Encyclopedia

• 1. Introduction

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  An encyclopedia sits quietly on a library shelf, promising everything a reader needs to know. The word itself carries a hidden mistake, one made by a copyist in 1470, and that error changed how Europeans understood the entire tradition of compiled knowledge. What began as two separate Greek words, enkúklios paideía, meaning a general circle of education, was misread as a single Greek word by scribes copying a Latin edition of Quintilian. From that moment, readers assumed the Romans had named an ancient genre of reference work. They had not. The genre came first; the name, as we know it, came from a blunder. That combination of ambition and accident runs through the whole history of encyclopedias, from the 37 chapters of Pliny the Elder to the billions of pages indexed online today. How did a handwritten summary of Roman natural history become the model for a project containing articles in over 300 languages? And what does it mean for a single reference work to describe itself as covering practically everything that it is necessary to know?

• 2. The Shape of Knowledge

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  Merriam-Webster defines an encyclopedia as a work containing information on all branches of knowledge, usually in articles arranged alphabetically by subject. That structure sets it apart from the dictionary in a precise way. A dictionary fixes itself to words: their definitions, pronunciations, grammatical forms, and etymologies. Its entries cannot be cleanly translated because they describe language, not ideas. An encyclopedia describes concepts. Its articles can be retitled and translated without losing their core function, because the subject, not the word, is the anchor. A dictionary entry on "iron" explains the word; an encyclopedia article on iron explains the metal. The distinction matters because it shapes what can be included. Encyclopedia articles frequently carry maps, illustrations, bibliographies, and statistics alongside their prose, giving the reader a richer foundation for understanding a subject's place in a broader field.

• 3. Pliny and the First Compilers

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  Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman living in the 1st century AD, produced the earliest encyclopedic work to survive to modern times: the Natural History, a compilation of 37 chapters covering topics from architecture and medicine to geography, geology, and Roman engineering. Pliny acknowledged a debt to Varro, a scholar of the 1st century BCE, situating his work in a long tradition of Roman intellectual accumulation. The Natural History became one of the first classical manuscripts printed, in 1470, and it remained a standard reference on Roman art and technology for centuries after. Isidore of Seville, a Spanish scholar writing around 600-625 AD, pushed the model further. His Etymologiae assembled 448 chapters across 20 books, drawing on hundreds of classical sources and covering grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, pagan philosophy, geography, animals, agriculture, ships, food, and tools. Of that work, contemporaries said quaecunque fere sciri debentur: practically everything that it is necessary to know. Cassiodorus followed with the Institutiones, written between 543 and 560, focused on Christian divinity and the seven liberal arts. The 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda contained around 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost entirely.

• 4. China's Encyclopedic Tradition

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  The Shiben, a Chinese reference work dating to the 2nd century BC, has been described as an encyclopedia of genealogies. The Huanglan, completed in the 220s, was an early example of the leishu format, a genre of thematic reference compilation that would run through Chinese scholarship for centuries. The Yiwen Leiju, finished in 624, was a landmark literature encyclopedia of the early Tang dynasty, and the Tang period also produced the Chuxue ji and Liutie. Three comprehensive institutional encyclopedias, the Tongdian, Tongzhi, and Wenxian Tongkao, covered the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties respectively; scholars grouped them together as the Three Tongs, or Santong. The Four Great Books of Song, compiled during the early Song dynasty from 960 to 1279, represented an enormous literary undertaking of their era. The last of those four, the Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau, ran to 9.4 million Chinese characters across 1,000 written volumes. The Yongle Encyclopedia, completed in 1408, comprised 11,095 volumes, making it the largest paper encyclopedia in world history. Among the individual scholars who shaped this tradition, Shen Kuo, the scientist and statesman who lived from 1031 to 1095, produced the Dream Pool Essays in 1088. Song Yingxing, who lived from 1587 to 1666, was later called the "Diderot of China" by British historian Joseph Needham.

• 5. Print Changes Everything

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  Before printing arrived, encyclopedic works were hand-copied and available mainly to wealthy patrons and scholars in monastic settings. The introduction of printing from Asia allowed far wider circulation, so that individual scholars could own their own copies for the first time. The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 was among the best-documented early printed books, notable for successfully integrating illustrations with text; both a Latin and a German edition were printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg. Giorgio Valla's De expetendis et fugiendis rebus was published posthumously in 1501 by Aldo Manuzio in Venice, and it added translations of ancient Greek mathematical works, including those of Archimedes, to the traditional scheme of liberal arts. Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosophica, printed in 1503, covered all seven liberal arts in a single complete encyclopedia. John Harris is often credited with establishing the now-familiar alphabetical format in English in 1704 with his Lexicon Technicum, which did not simply define the terms of arts and sciences but explained the arts and sciences themselves. Sir Isaac Newton contributed his only published work on chemistry to the second volume of that work, issued in 1710. Financial and commercial forces reshaped the encyclopedia industry from there: German publishers began selling books with sections missing in order to get volumes to market faster, and multiple publishers began pooling resources because no single house could afford the full undertaking.

• 6. The Door-to-Door Era

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  In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s brought a wave of large popular encyclopedias sold on installment plans, with the best-known being World Book and Funk and Wagnalls. As many as 90 percent of these sets were sold door to door, and the salespeople who pitched them became common enough figures to attract jokes. Author Jack Lynch described their approach in his book You Could Look It Up: they were selling not books but a lifestyle, a future, a promise of social mobility. A 1961 World Book advertisement, showing a feminine hand holding an order form, told readers: "You are holding your family's future in your hands right now." By the 1990s, the two most prominent encyclopedias published in the United States were Collier's Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana. That era of door-to-door sales was already ending as publishers moved toward digital formats.

• 7. From CD-ROM to Wikipedia

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  By the late 20th century, encyclopedias arrived on CD-ROM for use with personal computers, and the disc remained the standard medium for computer-accessed encyclopedic knowledge through the 1980s and 1990s. CD-ROM editions typically hyperlinked article text and included photographs, audio clips for subjects like historical speeches and musical instruments, and video clips, usually rendered at low resolutions of 160x120 or 320x240 pixels. Microsoft's Encarta, launched in 1993, became a landmark in this format because it had no printed counterpart. Encarta featured around 25,000 articles supported by roughly 7,000 high-quality images, 9 hours of audio files, and 30 videos. Microsoft discontinued the Encarta line in 2009 as internet encyclopedias took over from disc-based software. The concept of a free online encyclopedia appeared earlier than many people assume. The Interpedia proposal, circulated on Usenet in 1993, outlined an internet-based encyclopedia to which anyone could contribute, with content freely accessible to all. Richard Stallman proposed the GNUPedia in 1999 along similar lines, shaped by his GNU philosophy of generic, free resources. It was Wikipedia, launched in 2001, that made the concept stable and permanent. Wikipedia became the world's largest encyclopedia in 2004 at the 300,000-article mark and produced over two million articles in more than 80 languages by late 2005. It now holds articles in English, over 60 million combined articles in more than 300 languages, and over 250 million combined pages including project and discussion pages.