What’s the original sense of the term “alveary”?

'Alvearium' in English before Baret

The earliest English-language treatment I've been able to find of alvearie—or more precisely, of its Latin antecedents—is from Thomas Elyot, The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght (1538), which consists of English definitions of Latin words:

Aluearium, et Alueare, a place where hiues be sette. also a stocke of hyues.

According to Elyot, the word for the hive itself (as opposed to the setting place for multiple hives) is alueus or aluus:

Alueus et aluus, a hyue for bees, a vessaile to washe in, the bealy of any thing that lacketh lyfe. sometyme it signifieth a shyppe.

Although Elyot's entry for alueus is clearly more varied and potentially figurative than his entry for aleurium, it doesn't suggest any application to a repository of knowledge or information.

Also antedating Baret's 1574 dictionary title is Richard Huleot, Huloets Dictionarie Newelye Corrected, Amended, Set in Order and Enlarged (1572), which has these relevant entries:

Hiue for bees. Alueus, Aluus, ui. foe. ge. Vne ruche de mousches a miel. S. Apiarium, ij. n. g. A place where bees are set. Vn lieu des mousches a miel. S.

Hiue where the bees make their hony, or the place where the hyues be. Aluear, siue Alueare, & Aluearium, ij. n. ge. Vne ruche ou les mouches font leur miel, ou le lieu ou sont les ruches. S.

Hiue made after the shape of a shippe. Naustibulū, Alueus ad similitudinem nauis factus. Cal.

Hiue maker.← Aluearius.*

Regrettably, Huleot doesn't provide a Latin word for dictionary, but there is no indication that alvearie had any currency in the sense of "multilanguage dictionary" as of 1572.

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'Alveary' in early English-only dictionaries

The earliest occurrence I've found of of alvearie as an defined word in an English-only dictionary is in Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie: Or, an Interpreter of Hard English Words, second edition (1626), which spells it differently in two separate places:

Aluearie, A Bee-hiue.

a Bee-hiue, Aluiary

Thomas Blount, Glossographia Or a Dictionary: Interpreting All Such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as Now Are Used in Our Refined English Tongue (1656) includes a definition of the term that includes both its literal apiary meaning and its potential metaphorical meanings:

Alveary (alvearium) a Bee-hive or the place where Bees or Bee-hives stand. It may be used metaphorically for a house full of Inhabitants, a Library full of Books, or the like.

Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, or a Generall Dictionary (1658), however, reports only the simple sense of the term:

Alveary, (Lat.) a Hive of Bees.

And Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary: Explaining the Difficult Terms That Are Used in Divinity, Husbandry, Physick, Phylosophy, Law, Navigation, Marhematicks, and Other Arts and Sciences (1676) follows suit:

Alveary, l. Bee-hives.

John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturæ; The Mstery of Husbandry Discovered (16775) conveniently distinguishes in consecutive entries between the similar terms alveary and apiary:

Alveary, a Hive of Bees.

Apiary, a place or Court where Bees are kept.

This gives alveary the meaning that alueus had in Elyot's 1538 dictionary, and it gives apiary a meaning very similar to the one that aluearium had in Elyot's dictionary.

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The earliest English-language use of alvearium that I found in a series of searches of the Early English Books Online database uses the word in a completely unexpected (but logically related) way. From Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia A Description of the Body of Man (1615):

But the Cauity which is next vnto the hole of Hearing wherein the eare-wax is, is cald [word or words in non-Latin alphabet] Aluearium, and the bitter waxe it selfe Aphrodisaeus calles [word or words in non-Latin alphabet].

Clearly the chamber where ear wax collects was named aluearium in honor of the wax-making chamber of a beehive.

That meaning remained in English for at least a century, as we see in examples from Stephen Blancard, The Physical Dictionary, Wherein the Terms of Anatomy, the Names and Causes of Diseases, Chyrurgical Instruments and Their Use; Are Accurately Described, second edition (1693):

Alvearium, the cavity of the inward Ear, near the passage which conveys the Sound, where that yellow and bitter excrementitious stuff is bred.

and from John Harris, Lexicon Technicum: Or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1704), a lexicographer who clearly didn't invent the wording he used:

ALVEARIUM, is the Cavity of the inward Ear, near the Passage which conveys the Sound, where that yellow and bitter excrementitious Stuff is bred, called Ear-Wax.

The same entries appear at least as late as the seventh edition of Blancard's Physical Dictionary (1726) and the fourth edition of Harris's Lexicon Technicum (1725)—although none of the seventeenth-century dictionaries of hard words cited earlier note the usage.

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Baret's responsibility for the 'multiple-language dictionary' meaning of 'alveary'

Perhaps the clearest explanation of Baret's responsibility for introducing the sense of multiple-language dictionary comes from Baret himself, as noted in Joseph Shipley, Dictionary of Early English (1955):

alveary. A company of busy workers; a monumental work, such as an encyclopedia. (From Latin alvearium, a range of beehives; alveus, a hollow vessel, hence a beehive. Also Latin alvus, womb; hence English alvary, womb, lap, as in Barnfield's CASSANDRA, 1595: From his soft bosom, th' alvary of bliss.) Baret in 1580, used the word alveary of an interlingual dictionary (English, Latin, French, and Greek), which, for the apt similitude between the good scholars and diligent bees in gathering their wax and honey into their hive I called then their alvearie. ... By an equal similitude, anatomists call the hollow of the ear, where wax accumulates, the alveaary.

Robert Gordon, A Dictionary of the English Language (1876) cites a bit more of Baret's comment in its entry for alveary:

Alveary, s. {Lat. alvearium = beehive.} Book serving as a reportorium or thesaurus. Obsolete. [Source note:] Within a yeare or two, they had gathered together a great volume, which (for the apt similitude betweene the good scholars and diligent bees in gathering their wax and honie into their hive) I called them their alvearie: both for a memoriall by whom it was made, and also by this name to encourage other to the like diligence, for that they should not see their worthie praise for the same unworthwhilie drowned in oblivion.—Barret, To the Reader.

It seems very clear that the hive sense of alvearium was known to Latin-literate English writers of Baret's time and that he invented the application of the word to his multiple-language dictionary. At least through the end of the seventeenth century, however, the term alveary doesn't seem to have been widely understood to mean a dictionary, although it did by 1626 have some currency as a term for a beehive.

Still, it isn't clear to me that alveary had any meaning to the everyday English-speaking populace of England in the late sixteenth century, either before or after Baret's book appeared. My impression is that learned readers understood Baret's usage of alvearie in the figurative sense of "beehive," the greater number of relatively unlearned readers had no clear idea what it meant, and the vast majority of the English population (who couldn't read at all) had never heard anyone say the word alveary in any context.