Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word encyclopedia derives from the Koine Greek phrase enkúklios paideía, meaning a general circle of education. A scribal error in 1470, made by copyists of a Latin edition of Quintilian, fused the two separate Greek words into a single compound, which then became the Neo-Latin encyclopaedia and passed into English.
The Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman of the 1st century AD, is the earliest encyclopedic work to survive to modern times. It comprises 37 chapters covering natural history, architecture, medicine, geography, and geology, and it was one of the first classical manuscripts to be printed, in 1470.
The Yongle Encyclopedia, completed in 1408, comprised 11,095 volumes and holds the record as the largest paper encyclopedia in world history. Before it, the Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau, compiled during the Song dynasty, ran to 9.4 million Chinese characters across 1,000 written volumes.
A dictionary focuses on linguistic information about words, including definitions, pronunciations, etymology, and grammatical forms, whereas an encyclopedia focuses on the concepts or subjects those words represent. Because encyclopedia articles describe ideas rather than words, they can be translated between languages; dictionary entries, tied to specific words, cannot be fully translated.
Microsoft Encarta launched in 1993 as the first major CD-ROM encyclopedia with no printed equivalent, featuring around 25,000 articles, roughly 7,000 high-quality images, 9 hours of audio, and 30 videos. Microsoft discontinued the Encarta line in 2009 as internet encyclopedias displaced disc-based software.
The English Wikipedia, started in 2001, became the world's largest encyclopedia in 2004 when it reached 300,000 articles. By late 2005 it had produced over two million articles in more than 80 languages; it now holds over 60 million combined articles in more than 300 languages.