A page from a 15th century manuscript of a Latin-German dictionary, "Vocabularis Ex quo". The manuscript consists of two complementary parts from 1421 and 1450. The Latin-German »Vocabularis Ex quo« was, to judge from the more than 270 surviving manuscripts and some fifty incunabula editions, the most commonly used late medieval alphabetical dictionary on German soil. It was meant by its anonymous compiler-author to enable pauperes scolares to read and literally understand the Scriptures and other Latin texts. It dates from the late 14th century and, spreading all over the then German speaking countries, kept being copied until the last decades of the 15th century.