It is a little known fact that the first dictionary, which was written by the Spartans, only contained three entries. The first, "dictionary" was defined as "word book". The second entry was for the word "word": defined as "thing thing". In an appendix, under the the third and final entry "book" was written, simply, "see book" - this being a reference to the book itself.
Tragically, the Spartan Dictionary was lost to us in the Library of Alexandria when the library was switching between two systems of library classification during a fire. The only known extant fragment (held in a private collection) is a draft of the appendix alone and hence meaningless.
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