In their practical use the Vocabulary and the Glossary fulfilled
similar offices; and so they were often combined; the possessor of a
Vocabulary enlarged it by the addition of a Glossary, which he or some
one before him had copied out and collected from the glossed
manuscripts of his bibliotheca. He extended it by copying into it
vocabularies and glossaries borrowed from other scholars; he lent his
own collection to be similarly copied by others. Several such
collections exist formed far back in Old English times, the composite
character of which, partly glossary, partly vocabulary, reveals itself
upon even a cursory examination.
As these manuscript lists came to be copied and re-copied, it was seen
that their usefulness would be increased by putting the words and
phrases into alphabetical order, whereby a particular word could be
more readily found than by looking for it in a promiscuous list of
some hundreds or thousands of words. The first step was to bring
together all the words having the same first letter. The copyist
instead of transcribing the glossary right on as it stood, extracted
first all the words beginning with A; then he went through it again
picking out all the words beginning with B; then a third time for
those with C, and so on with D, E, and the rest, till he had
transcribed the whole, and his copy was no longer in the fortuitous
disorder of the original, but in what we call _first-letter_ order.
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