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Lexicography bibliography
Traces of lexicography in its earliest forms can be found as far back as 3200 B.C.E. The first known lexicographical texts come from the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, and are written in Cuneiform on clay tablets. These and other ancient lexicographical records contained wordlists documenting a language's lexicon. Other early wordlists have been discovered in Egyptian, Akkadian, Sanskrit, and Elbaite, and take the shape of mono- and bilingual wordlists. They were organized in different ways including by subject and part of speech. The first extensive glosses, or wordlists with accompanying definitions, began to appear around 300 B.C.E., and the discipline begins to develop more steadily. Lengthier glosses started to emerge in Greece, Rome, China, and India, Persia, and the Middle East, and in 636 C.E. the first formal etymological compendium was published, compiled by Isidore of Seville. The word dictionarium was first applied to this type of text by the late 14th century C.E. With the invention and spread of printing in the 15th century, lexicography flourished. Dictionaries became more widespread, and their purpose shifted from a way to store lexical knowledge to a mode of disseminating such information. Modern lexicographical practices really began to take shape in the 18th and 19th century led by notable lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson, Vladimir Ivanovich Da, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Noah Webster, James Murray, Peter Mark Roget, Joseph Worcester, and others.

During the 20th century, the invention of computers changed lexicography again. With access to large lexical databases, the task of finding evidence for various definitions became significantly faster and easier. Corpus research also enables lexicographers to discriminate different senses of a word based on lexical evidence. Additionally, lexicographers could now work in whatever order they wished instead of working systematically through the alphabet.

As with many other disciplines, the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence is having drastic effects on lexicography. While lexicography has historically been an extremely detail-oriented and time-consuming task, AI powered lexicography could change the entire nature of the endeavor. Heralded by some as "the end of lexicography", dictionaries are quickly trying to adapt to this new technology and explore its capabilities. Despite concerns from some, others posit that human lexicographers will continue to be necessary to work alongside AI to address the inherently human complexities of language and lexical change.