📚 Dictionaries

The lexicographer’s shelf: Johnson’s nine years, Murray’s scriptorium, and the definition arguments inside both.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject dictionaries in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	A Greek-English Lexicon	Henry George Liddell	1843	150
	Dictionary of National Biography	George Murray Smith	1885	122
	Dictionary of the Bible	William Smith	1860	84
	The General Biographical Dictionary	Alexander Chalmers	1812	66
	A Sanskrit-English dictionary	Monier Monier-Williams	1872	55
	Pronouncing dictionary of the Spanish and English languages	Mariano Velázquez de la Cadena	1852	46
	Dictionary of music and musicians	Sir George Grove	1879	46
	The cyclopaedia ; or, universal dictionary of arts, sciences and literature	Abraham Rees	1810	44
	Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable	Ebenezer Cobham Brewer	1870	39
	Historical encyclopedia of Illinois	Newton Bateman	1899	39
	The Oxford companion to music	Scholes, Percy Alfred	1938	38
	Practical medical dictionary	Thomas Lathrop Stedman	1918	37
	Dictionary of philosophy and psychology, including many of the principal conceptions of ethics, logic, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, mental pathology, anthropology, biology,	James Mark Baldwin	1901	27
	Dictionary of Islam	Thomas Patrick Hughes	1885	23
	Le répertoire de la cuisine	Louis Saulnier	1914	22
	The dictionary of imaginary places	Alberto Manguel	1980	20
	An encyclopædia of occultism	Lewis Spence	1920	19
	An ABZ of Love	Inge Hegeler	1963	18
	Black's Law Dictionary	Bryan A. Garner	1990	18
	Law dictionary	Henry Campbell Black	1933	16
	Mathematics dictionary	Glenn James	1942	15
	The Oxford picture dictionary	Norma Shapiro	1998	15
	Word by Word Picture Dictionary	Steven J. Molinsky	1994	14
	The encyclopedia of furniture	Joseph Aronson	1938	12
	A dictionary of ballet terms	Leo Kersley	1952	12
	The Usborne illustrated dictionary of science	Corinne Stockley	1988	12
	Dictionnaire des symboles	Chevalier, Jean	1969	11
	Wordpower	Edward de Bono	1977	11
	Dictionary of anthropology	Charles Winick	1956	10
	The potter's dictionary of materials and techniques	Frank Hamer	1975	10

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.