The term encyclopedia originated from a translation error in 1470 when copyists treated two separate Greek words as a single compound term called enkyklopaidia. This spurious word became the Neo-Latin encyclopedia and eventually entered English usage.
Chinese scholars produced the Yongle Encyclopedia which was completed on the 2nd of May 1408. It comprised 11,095 volumes making it the largest paper encyclopedia in world history.
Noah Webster later standardized spelling variations between encyclopedia for American English and encyclopaedia for British contexts.
Microsoft launched Encarta in 1993 featuring 25,000 articles supplemented by 7,000 high-quality images and nine hours of audio files. The product line was discontinued after sixteen years in 2009 due to rising internet adoption rates.
The English Wikipedia started in 2001 becoming the world's largest encyclopedia at the 300,000 article stage in 2004. By late 2005 Wikipedia produced over two million articles across more than 80 languages under copyleft GNU Free Documentation License.