How was the first dictionary made?

The first dictionaries were available through the printing press, as they are today, but they had to be bound by hand. They used parchment for paper and either calf skin or wood for the covers.

The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by an English teacher named Robert Cawdrey in 1604. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1775, however, is considered the first reliable dictionary produced. In 1806, American Noah Webster published his own dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster began compiling a second expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language.