An encyclopedia (alternatively encyclopaedia/encylopædia) is a written compendium of knowledge. The term from the Greek words εγκύκλιος
παιδεία, enkyklios paideia ("in a circle of instruction"). This comes from
εγκύκλιος, "circuit-shaped," from κύκλος ("circuit")
and παιδεία ("instruction"). Many encyclopedias are titled Cyclopaedia and the terms
are interchangeable.
Encyclopedias can be general, containing articles on topics in many different fields (the English-language Encyclopædia Britannica and German
Brockhaus are well-known examples), or they can specialize in a particular
field (such as an encyclopedia of medicine, philosophy, or law). There are also encyclopedias that cover a wide variety
of topics from a particular cultural, ethnic, or national perspective, such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia or Encyclopedia Judaica.
Many dictionaries are encyclopedic in their range, especially those
concerned with a particular field (such as the Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionary of American
Naval Fighting Ships, and Black's Law
Dictionary). Encyclopedic works have been produced throughout much of human history, but the term encyclopedia was
not used to refer to such works until the 16th century.
There are 2 main methods of organizing encyclopedias: the alphabetical method (consisting of a number of separate articles, organised in alphabetical order), or
organization by hierarchical categories. The former is the most common by far,
especially for general works.
Early encyclopedic works
The idea of collecting all of the world's knowledge within arm's reach under a single roof goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon. Many writers of antiquity (such as Aristotle) attempted
to write comprehensively about all human knowledge. One of the most significant of these early encyclopedists was Pliny the Elder (first century C.E.), who wrote the Naturalis Historia (Natural History), a 37 volume account of the
natural world that was extremely popular in Western Europe for much of the Middle Ages.
The Chinese emperor Cheng-Zu of the Ming Dynasty oversaw the compilation of the Yongle Encyclopedia, one of the largest encyclopedias in history, which was completed in 1408 and comprised over 11,000 handwritten volumes, of which only about 400 now survive.
In the succeeding dynasty, the Chinese emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty personally composed 40,000
poems as part of a 4.7 million page library in 4 divisions, including thousands of essays. It is instructive to compare his title
for this knowledge, Watching the waves in a Sacred Sea to a Western-style title for all knowledge.
The early Muslim compilations of knowledge in the
middle ages included many comprehensive works, and much development of what we now call scientific method, historical method, and citation. Notable works include
Abu Bakr al-Razi's encyclopedia of science, the Mutazilite Al-Kindi's prolific output of 270 books, and Ibn Sina's medical encyclopedia, which was a standard reference work for centuries. Also
notable are works of universal history (or sociology) from Asharites, al-Tabri, al-Masudi, Ibn Rustah, al-Athir, and Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqadimmah contains cautions regarding trust in written records that remain
wholly applicable today. These people had an incalculable influence on methods of research and editing, due in part to the
Islamic practice of isnad which emphasized fidelity to written record, checking sources,
and skeptical inquiry.
However, these works were rarely available to more than specialists: they were expensive, and written for those extending
knowledge rather than (with some exceptions in medicine) using it.
Modern encyclopedias
The modern idea of the general purpose widely distributed printed encyclopedia goes back to just a little before Denis Diderot and the 18th
century encyclopedists.
Although John Harris is often credited with establishing the now-familiar
encyclopedia format in 1704 with his Lexicon technicum, the English physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne specifically employed the word encyclopaedia in the preface to his readers to describe
his work Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar
Errors as early as 1646. Browne structured his encyclopaedia upon the time-honoured
schemata of the Renaissance, the so-called 'scale of creation' which ascends a hierarchical ladder via the mineral, vegetable,
animal, human, planetary and cosmological worlds. Browne's compendium of refutations of common errors of his age was England's
first popular household encyclopaedia. Its popularity is confirmed by the fact that it went through no less than five editions,
each revised and augmented, the last edition appearing in 1672. Pseudodoxia
Epidemica also found itself upon the bookshelves of many educated European readers for throughout the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries it was translated into the French, Dutch and German languages as well as Latin.
Ephraim Chambers published his Cyclopaedia in 1723. The French translation of this was the inspiration of the Encyclopédie, perhaps the most famous early encyclopedia, edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot and completed in 1772 - 28 volumes, 71,818
articles, 2,885 illustrations. The venerable Encyclopædia Britannica had a modest beginning in Scotland: from 1768 to 1797 three editions were published.
The early years of the nineteenth century saw a flowering of encyclopedia publishing in Britain, Europe and America. In
England Rees's Cyclopaedia (1802-1819) contains an enormous amount in information about the industrial
and scientific revolutions of the time. A feature of these publications is the high-quality illustrations made by engravers like
Wilson Lowry of art work supplied by specialist draftsmen like John Farey, Jr. Encyclopaedias were published in Scotland, as a result of the Scottish
Enlightenment, for education there was of a higher standard than in the rest of Britain.
Encyclopædia Britannica appeared in various editions throughout the century, and the growth of popular education and the
Mechanics Institutes, spearheaded by the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge led to the production of the Penny Cyclopaedia, as its title suggests issued in weekly numbers at a penny each
like a newspaper.
In the 20th century, Encyclopædia Britannica reached its
fifteenth edition, and cheap encyclopedias such as Harmsworth's Encyclopaedia and Everyman's
Encyclopaedia were common.
More recently encyclopedias are also being published online.
Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually
people with an academic degree. This is not the case with Wikipedia, a project started in 2001 with the goal
to create a free encyclopedia. Anyone can add or improve text, images and sounds. The contents are licensed under a free copyleft license (the GFDL). By 2004 the project has managed to produce over a million articles in over 80 languages.
Encyclopedias are essentially derivative from what has gone before, and particularly in the 19th century piracy was common. To make space for modern
topics, valuable material of historic use has to be discarded. But old encyclopedias should not be overlooked, especially for a
record of changes in science and technology.
Encyclopedia making
The encyclopedia's hierarchical structure and evolving nature is particularly adaptable to a disk-based or on-line computer format, and all major printed encyclopedias had moved to this method of delivery by the end of the 20th century. Disk-based (typically CD-ROM format) publications have the advantage of being cheaply produced and extremely portable. Additionally, they
can include media which is impossible in the printed format, such as animations, audio, and video. Hyperlinking between conceptually related items is also
a significant benefit. On-line encyclopedias offer the additional advantage of being (potentially) dynamic: new information can
be presented almost immediately, rather than waiting for the next release of a static format (as with a disk or paper based
publication).
Information in a printed encyclopedia necessarily needs some form of hierarchical structure, and traditionally the method
employed is to present the information ordered alphabetically by the article title. However with the advent of dynamic electronic formats the need to impose a pre-determined structure is unnecessary.
Nonetheless, most electronic encyclopedias still offer a range of organisational strategies for the articles, such as by subject
area or alphabetically.
Note on spelling
Encyclopedia is the dominant spelling used in the United States; an alternate spelling, encyclopaedia (sometimes
rendered encyclopædia, with the æ ligature) is commonly used in British and Commonwealth English. The digraph ae or æ, the normal Latin rendering of
the Greek diphthong ai, is usually changed to e in American
orthography, for example in other words from the root paid- such as paediatrician (American pediatrician).
Contemporary British usage often makes the same simplification; in this case, though, the Oxford English Dictionary
asserts that the spelling with æ "has been preserved from becoming obsolete by the fact that many of the works so called
have Latin titles, as Encyclopædia Britannica", which use the spelling with æ in their names.
Both the British Oxford English
Dictionary and the U.S. Webster's Third New
International Dictionary permit both spellings, although the OED prefers the æ form, and Webster's
prefers the e form. The citations given in the OED are roughly evenly divided between the two spellings.
List of encyclopedias
Notable encyclopedias and encyclopedists before 1700
- Pliny's Natural History 77 AD. Highly
influential in the Middle Ages.
- Cassiodorus' Institutiones, 560 AD. First Christian
encyclopedia.
- St Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, 636 AD. Christian encyclopedia, most influential encyclopedia of the early Middle
Ages.
- Adab al-kātib (The book of knowledge) by Ibn Qutayba (828-889). Earliest Arabic work that could be called an Encyclopedia.
- Bibliotheke by Patriarch Photios (9th century).
Earliest Byzantine work that could be called an Encyclopedia.
- Hrabanus Maurus, 842. De rerum naturis (On the nature
of things). Derived from Isidore's text.
- Suda (10th century)
- Bartholomeus de Glanvilla, De
proprietatibus rerum, 1240. The most widely read and quoted encyclopedia in the late-medieval period.
- Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Majus, 1260. The
most ambitious encyclopedia in the late-medieval period over 3 million words.
- Yongle Encyclopedia (1403–1408). Early Chinese encyclopedia.
- Theodor Zwinger (1533–1588), Theatrum Vitae Humanae, 1588.
- Louis Moréri The Great Historical Dictionary, 1671.
- Pierre Bayle Historical and Critical Dictionary, 1695.
- Vincenzo Coronelli publisher of Biblioteca Universale
Sacro-Profana early 18th century, the first encyclopedia to be alphabetical.
- John Henry
Alsted
- John Jacob
Hoffman
Encyclopedias published 1700–1800
French encyclopedias
German Encyclopedias
Encyclopedias published 1800–1900
Specialist Encyclopedias
American Encyclopedias
German Encyclopedias
Encyclopedias published 1900–2000
American Encyclopedias
German Encyclopedias
Religious Encyclopedias
Russian Encyclopedias
Encyclopedias published 2000 onwards
Spanish Encyclopedias
- Gran
Enciclopedia Planeta (2004, Spain)
Reference
- Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages, 2nd ed. (New York, London: Hafner 1966)
External links
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