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Cyclopædia

Work edited by Chambers
Alternative Title: “Cyclopædia; or, An Unusual Dictionary of Arts and Sciences”

Cyclopædia, in full Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, two-volume, alphabetically arranged encyclopaedia compiled and edited by the English encyclopaedist Ephraim Chambers and first published in 1728. The illustrated work treated the arts and sciences; names of persons or places were not included. Seven editions had been published in London by 1751–52. The materials for seven additional volumes were published in two folio volumes in 1753 as a Supplement after having been reworked first by John Lewis Scott and then by John Hill after the death of Chambers.

Although Chambers declined an invitation in 1739 to publish a French edition of his Cyclopædia, a projected French translation of the work became the starting point for L’Encyclopédie, the great 18th-century French encyclopaedia edited by the French philosopher and translator Denis Diderot and the French mathematician Jean d’Alembert.

Learn More in these related articles:

c. 1680 Kendal, Westmorland, Eng. May 15, 1740 London British encyclopaedist whose work formed a basis for the 18th-century French Encyclopaedists.

in encyclopaedia

Illustration from the entry on the winds in St. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, an edition published in Strasbourg c. 1473.
...of French encyclopaedias. Harris’s emphasis on the need to include scientific and technical subjects helped to reverse the trend. This process was completed by the issue of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728). Like Harris, Chambers omitted people in favour of more information on the arts and sciences, and he paid more attention to clear expositions of ancient and modern...
...(1704). Classical writers made many references to their predecessors’ efforts and often incorporated whole passages from other encyclopaedias. Of all the many examples, the Cyclopaedia (1728) of the English encyclopaedist Ephraim Chambers has been outstanding in its influence, for Diderot’s and Rees’s encyclopaedias would have been very different if Chambers had...
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Cyclopædia
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