People know two kinds of heritage: the personal and the cultural. The two merge into each other at some points. So, for instance, to register one’s mother tongue in a dictionary is to register the language one learned literally from one’s mother, the language that one was already acquiring with the discriminating ears and grammatical flair of early infancy – but it is also to register the language that links one to, and indeed binds one into, a speech-community far wider than the household of one’s infancy. Henri Estienne learned French from his mother and his family, but his sense of being French and of being at home where French was spoken was more than a sense of his familial inheritance. Likewise, he acquired his Greek and Latin as a member of the extraordinary household in which he grew up, and developed his dedication to classical scholarship as a son of his inspiringly learned father, but, as a learned writer, he communicated with – in the senses of writing for and being part of – the whole commonwealth of the learned, and, as a reader of Latin and Greek, he communicated with the great tradition of the living and the dead who wrote in those languages. The learned languages were one of his personal heritages, and one of his cultural heritages. French was another of each of these. Reformed Christian belief and thought was a third.

Telling the stories of heritage is one way to tell the story of dictionaries.