About the middle of the century,
also, was compiled the famous _Medulla Grammatices_[5], designated,
with some propriety, 'the first Latin-English Dictionary,' the
popularity of which is shown by the many manuscript copies that still
survive; while it formed the basis of the _Ortus (i.e. Hortus)
Vocabulorum_ or first printed Latin-English Dictionary, which issued
from the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, and in many subsequent
editions down to 1533, as well as in an edition by Pynson in 1509.
But all the glossaries and vocabularies as yet mentioned were
Latin-English; their primary object was not English, but the
elucidation of Latin. A momentous advance was made about 1440, when
Brother Galfridus Grammaticus--Geoffrey the Grammarian--a Dominican
friar of Lynn Episcopi in Norfolk, produced the English-Latin
vocabulary, to which he gave the name of _Promptuarium_ or
_Promptorium Parvulorum_, the Children's Store-room or Repository.
The _Promptorium_, the name of which has now become a household word
to students of the history of English, is a vocabulary containing some
10,000 words--substantives, adjectives, and verbs--with their Latin
equivalents, which, as edited by Mr.
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