

In the preface to the dictionary Cawdrey criticises the poor standard of English spoken by people at the time: while some simplified their speech 'so that the most ignorant may well understand them' , others decorated their sentences with fancy phrases and complicated words, 'forgetting altogether their mothers language, so that if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell or vnderstand what they say.' He writes of how 'far journied gentlemen' collect words on their travels and, coming home, 'pouder their talke with over-sea language.' Cawdrey wanted the English language to be better organised and felt his book might help the reader to understand challenging words. That is because the myDictionarysearchKey Dictionary indexer access in TryGetValue extension is already guarded by the ContainsKey check.

The 'Table Alphabeticall' was an attempt to explain 'hard' words - i.e. According to the CA1854 performance rule, we should prefer the TryGetValue method over the ContainsKey method, when we want to retrieve the associated value of the key too. At this time the English language was expanding - influenced by trade, travel and new innovations in the fields of arts and sciences. It lists approximately 3000 words, defining each one with a simple and brief description. Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first single-language English dictionary ever published. Online version of Francis Joseph Steingass A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, Including the Arabic Words and Phrases to be Met with in Persian.
