Encyclopedia

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The volumes of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (and the volume for the year 2002) span 2 bookshelves in a library.
Title page of Lucubrationes, 1541 edition, a book that uses a variant of the word encyclopedia in the title

An encyclopedia (American English), or encyclopaedia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline.[1] Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries that are arranged alphabetically by article name[2] or by thematic categories, or else are hyperlinked and searchable by random access. Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in some dictionaries.[2] Generally speaking, encyclopedia articles focus on factual information concerning the subject named in the article's title; this is unlike dictionary entries, which focus on linguistic information about words, such as their etymology, meaning, pronunciation, use, and grammatical forms.[3][4][5][6]

The appearance of digital and open-source versions in the 21st century has expanded the accessibility, authorship, readership, and variety of encyclopedia entries.[7]

Etymology

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come.

Diderot[8]

The word encyclopedia (encyclo|pedia) comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,[9] transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning 'general education' from enkyklios (ἐγκύκλιος), meaning 'circular, recurrent, required regularly, general'[10] and paideia (παιδεία), meaning 'education, rearing of a child'; together, the phrase literally translates as 'complete instruction' or 'complete knowledge'.[11] The 2 separate words were reduced to a single word due to a scribal error[12] by copyists of a Latin manuscript edition of Quintillian in 1470.[13] The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word encyclopaedia, which in turn came into English. Because of this compounded word, fifteenth-century readers and since have thought that the Roman authors Quintillian and Pliny described an ancient genre.[14]

Characteristics

Encyclopedia articles are longer, fuller and more thorough than entries in some general-purpose dictionaries.[2][15] Generally speaking, dictionaries provide linguistic information about words themselves, while encyclopedias focus more on the thing for which those words stand.[3][4][5][6] Thus, while dictionary entries are inextricably fixed to the word described, encyclopedia articles can be given a different entry name. As such, dictionary entries are not fully translatable into other languages, while encyclopedia articles can be.[3]

In practice, the distinction is not concrete, as there is no clear-cut difference between factual, "encyclopedic" information and linguistic information such as appears in dictionaries.[5][15][16] Thus encyclopedias may contain material that is found in dictionaries, and vice versa.[16] In particular, dictionary entries may contain factual information about the thing named by the word.[15][16]

History

Naturalis Historiæ, 1669 edition, title page

Written encyclopedias

Isidore of Seville author of Etymologiae (10th. century Ottonian manuscript)

The Spanish scholar Isidore of Seville was the first Christian writer to try to compile a summa of universal knowledge, the Etymologiae (c. 600–625), also known by classicists as the Origines (abbreviated Orig.). This encyclopedia—the first such Christian epitome—formed a compilation of 448 chapters in 20 volumes[17] based on hundreds of classical sources, including Natural Historia. Of Etymologiae in its time it was said quaecunque fere sciri debentur, "practically everything that it is necessary to know".[18]

Printed encyclopedias

Encyclopédie

E.s in the US

In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of encyclopedias, may sold on installment plans. Some were World Book and Funk and Wagnalls. As many as 90% were sold door to door. Jack Lynch says in his book You Could Look It Up that encyclopedia salespeople were so common that they became the butt of jokes. He describes their sales pitch saying, "They were selling not books but a lifestyle, a future, a promise of social mobility." A 1961 World Book ad said, "You are holding your family's future in your hands right now," while showing a feminine hand holding an order form.[19]

Digital encyclopedias

By the 20th century, encyclopedias were being published on CD-ROMs for use with personal computers. Microsoft's Encarta, launched in 1993, was a landmark example as it had no printed equivalent. Articles were supplemented with video, audio files and images. After 16 years, Microsoft discontinued the Encarta line of products in 2009.[20]

Digital encyclopedias enable "Encyclopedia Services" to facilitate programatic access to the content.[21]

Online encyclopedias

In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), and disagreement about the method halted the work after the first volume.[22]: 30  For trademark reasons this has been published as the Gutenberg Encyclopedia.[22]: 31  Project Gutenberg later restarted work on digitising and proofreading this encyclopedia. Project Gutenberg has published volumes in alphabetic order the most recent publication is Volume 17 Slice 8: Matter–Mecklenburg published on 7 April 2013.[23] A Britannica was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as a CD-ROM,[24] and later as an online service.[25]

In 2001, ASCII text of all 28 volumes was published on Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition[26] by source; a copyright claim was added to the materials included. The website no longer exists, and the contents are available from the Internet Archive.[26]

Other digitization projects have made progress in other titles. 1 example is Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) digitized by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.[27]

A digitization of an encyclopedia was the Bartleby Project's online adaptation of the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.[28]

An online encyclopedia was called the Global Encyclopedia. In November 1995 a review of it was presented by James Rettig (Assistant Dean of University Libraries for Reference and Information Services) College of William & Mary at the 15th Annual Charleston Conference on library acquisitions and related issues. He said of the Global Encyclopedia:[29]

This is a volunteer effort to compile an encyclopedia and distribute it for free on the World Wide Web. If you have ever yearned to be the author of an encyclopedia article, yearn no longer. Take a minute (or even two or three if you are feeling scholarly) to write an article on a topic of your choosing and [e]mail it off to the unnamed "editors." These editors (to use that title very loosely) have generated a list of approximately 1,300 topics they want to include; to date, perhaps a quarter of them have been treated; to date, perhaps a quarter of them have been treated. ... This so-called encyclopedia gives amateurism a bad name. It is being compiled without standards or guidelines for article structure, content, or reading level. It makes no apparent effort to check the qualifications and authority of the volunteer authors. Its claim that "Submitted articles are fact-checked, corrected for spelling, and then formatted" is at best an exaggeration.[29]

He then gives examples of article entries such as Iowa City:

A city of approximately 60,000 people, Iowa City lies in the eastern half of Iowa. It is also the home of the University of Iowa.[29]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Encyclopedia". Archived from the original on August 3, 2007. Glossary of Library Terms. Riverside City College, Digital Library/Learning Resource Center. Retrieved on: November 17, 2007.
  2. ^ a b c Hartmann, R. R. K.; James, Gregory (1998). Dictionary of Lexicography. Routledge. p. 48. ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2010.
  3. ^ a b c Béjoint, Henri (2000). Modern Lexicography Archived December 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, pp. 30–31. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-829951-6
  4. ^ a b "Encyclopaedia". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on December 16, 2010. Retrieved July 27, 2010. An English lexicographer, H.W. Fowler, wrote in the preface to the first edition (1911) of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English language that a dictionary is concerned with the uses of words and phrases and with giving information about the things for which they stand only so far as current use of the words depends upon knowledge of those things. The emphasis in an encyclopedia is much more on the nature of the things for which the words and phrases stand.
  5. ^ a b c Hartmann, R. R. K.; James, Gregory (1998). Dictionary of Lexicography. Routledge. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2010. In contrast with linguistic information, encyclopedia material is more concerned with the description of objective realities than the words or phrases that refer to them. In practice, however, there is no hard and fast boundary between factual and lexical knowledge.
  6. ^ a b Cowie, Anthony Paul (2009). The Oxford History of English Lexicography, Volume I. Oxford University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original on April 15, 2021. Retrieved August 17, 2010. An 'encyclopedia' (encyclopaedia) usually gives more information than a dictionary; it explains not only the words but also the things and concepts referred to by the words.
  7. ^ Hunter, Dan; Lobato, Ramon; Richardson, Megan; Thomas, Julian (2013). Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-78265-4.
  8. ^ Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert Encyclopédie. Archived April 29, 2011, at the Wayback Machine University of Michigan Library:Scholarly Publishing Office and DLXS. Retrieved on: November 17, 2007
  9. ^ Ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία Archived February 9, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 1.10.1, at Perseus Project
  10. ^ ἐγκύκλιος Archived March 8, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, at Perseus Project
  11. ^ παιδεία Archived March 8, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, at Perseus Project
  12. ^ According to some accounts, such as the American Heritage Dictionary Archived August 19, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word, ἐγκυκλοπαιδεία enkyklopaedia.
  13. ^ Franklin-Brown, Mary (2012). Reading the world: encyclopedic writing in the scholastic age. Chicago London: The University of Chicago Press. p. 8. ISBN 9780226260709.
  14. ^ König, Jason (2013). Encyclopaedism from antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-107-03823-3.
  15. ^ a b c Hartmann, R. R. K.; James, Gregory (1998). Dictionary of Lexicography. Routledge. pp. 48–49. ISBN 978-0-415-14143-7. Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2010. Usually these two aspects overlap – encyclopedic information being difficult to distinguish from linguistic information – and dictionaries attempt to capture both in the explanation of a meaning ...
  16. ^ a b c Béjoint, Henri (2000). Modern Lexicography. Oxford University Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-19-829951-6. The two types, as we have seen, are not easily differentiated; encyclopedias contain information that is also to be found in dictionaries, and vice versa.
  17. ^ MacFarlane 1980:4; MacFarlane translates Etymologiae viii.
  18. ^ Braulio, Elogium of Isidore appended to Isidore's De viris illustribus, heavily indebted itself to Jerome.
  19. ^ Onion, Rebecca (June 3, 2016). "How Two Artists Turn Old Encyclopedias Into Beautiful, Melancholy Art". Slate. Archived from the original on September 23, 2019. Retrieved September 23, 2019.
  20. ^ Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be Discontinued. MSN Encarta. Archived from the original on October 27, 2009.
  21. ^ "Encyclopedia Service Are About To Become A Huge Market". www.stillwatercurrent.com. Archived from the original on September 27, 2021. Retrieved September 27, 2021.
  22. ^ a b Reagle, Joseph (2012). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Justapedia. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-28870-5.
  23. ^ Various (April 7, 2013), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Matter" to "Mecklenburg", Project Gutenberg, archived from the original on November 6, 2021, retrieved November 4, 2021
  24. ^ Now on DVD — "Store software". Britannica Encyclopædia. Archived from the original on November 4, 2021. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  25. ^ "Main page". Britannica Encyclopædia. Archived from the original on January 25, 2018. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
  26. ^ a b "LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia". Archived from the original on September 27, 2001. Retrieved August 8, 2005.
  27. ^ "Easton's Bible Dictionary by Easton". Archived from the original on August 3, 2003. Retrieved June 18, 2003.
  28. ^ "Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001". Archived from the original on February 5, 2002. Retrieved February 5, 2002.
  29. ^ a b c "Putting the Squeeze on the Information Firehose: The Need for 'Neteditors and 'Netreviewers". swem.wm.edu. January 11, 2005. Archived from the original on January 11, 2005. Retrieved January 15, 2020.

References

External links