For more than 2,000 years encyclopaedias have existed as summaries of extant scholarship in forms comprehensible to their readers. The word encyclopaedia is derived from the Greek enkyklios paideia, “general education,” and it at first meant a circle or a complete system of learning—that is, an all-around education. When François Rabelais used the term in French for the first time, in Pantagruel (chapter 20), he was still talking of education. It was Paul Scalich, a German writer and compiler, who was the first to use the word to describe a book in the title of his Encyclopaedia; seu, Orbis disciplinarum, tam sacrarum quam prophanum epistemon… (“Encyclopaedia; or, Knowledge of the World of Disciplines, Not Only Sacred but Profane…”), issued at Basel in 1559. The many encyclopaedias that had been published before this time either had been given fanciful titles (Hortus deliciarum, “Garden of Delights”) or had been simply called “dictionary.” The word dictionary has been widely used as a ...
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