“Although the attempts to record some of the words of the Croatian language had already been known, in the narrow sense we can talk about Croatian lexicography only from the time of Faust Vrančić and his five-language dictionary from 1595 entitled Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum, which he left us in the legacy. This is our first dictionary published as an individual book. The author used Latin as a source language, only the Latin entries being arranged and alphabetically sorted, with some discrepancies, while the lexemes of the other four languages were sorted analogously so as to semantically follow the column in Latin. The dictionary contains about 5800 Croatian lexemes (mostly from the area of Vrančić’s native Šibenik and its surroundings), while there are many more words, because a part of the lexemes repeat several times. According to the lexicographic classification, Vrančić’s dictionary is among smaller dictionaries. To date, numerous and thorough research have been carried out on the author and on the dictionary itself, and therefore, we are familiar with almost all of its essential traits. Vrančić’s dictionary served in the creation of many other late-term dictionaries.”

Summary of the paper: Ćosić, K. 415 years of Vrančić’s Dictionary. // Hrvatistika: studentski jezikoslovni časopis 4, 4 (2010), pp. 249-255.