The medieval attitude was clearly that no-one would need a dictionary of common words in their native language. The idea that you would go to a book to find the spelling or the meaning of a word was alien to a largely oral society with no fixed system of orthography. Interlingual dictionaries are still useful today, of course, as we have learned in looking at words in different languages. In order to define a common word without using the word itself, dictionaries have to resort to the strangest kinds of locutions. That's wonderful except it doesn't help you in the slightest in identifying a hackberry tree.
Most simple dictionaries are even less help.
Dictionaries do not then arise from a real need to understand language, but from a social need to codify language. He worked inductively, drawing examples of word meanings from literature. He supplied sample quotations to back up his definitions. People turned to Johnson's Dictionary to learn correct standards of written expression. In 1828, Noah Webster , a New England lexicographer and entrepreneur, published his American Dictionary.