The collections
The Museum Plantin-Moretus conserves a multiple collections. Old printed books and manuscripts, printing presses and tools, paintings, prints and drawings, furniture and paintings and several archives.
The first Dutch dictionary - Cornelis Kiliaan
The first Dutch dictionary was printed in Plantijns printing office.
©LUCID
"You, Lowlander, whoever you are,
Do you love Dutch?
Then you must also love Kiliaan. "
Etymologicum Teutonicae Linguae
Cornelis Kiliaan (1528/1530–1607) worked for fifty years as a proofreader for Plantin. A widower, he lived in the house on the Vrijdagmarkt with his three children. When Plantin decided to publish a Dutch translation dictionary, he turned to his proofreader. Dictionaries became Kiliaan’s life’s work.
Kiliaan wrote the first explanatory dictionary of Dutch, containing 40,000 entries. He regarded the Brabant dialect as the “true” Dutch. Going beyond a mere list of existing words, he sought to explain their meanings by comparing them with words from other languages.
©LUCID
iCornelis Kiliaan, Etymologicum Teutonicae linguae, sive: Dictionarium Teutonico-Latinum (Antwerpen: Jan I Moretus, 1599), Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerpen.
