Ivan Dezman (1841-1873) physician, a medical writer and lexicographer, published the first Croatian medicinal dictionary (Rjecnik lijecnickog nazivlja; Croatian – German, German – Croatian) in 1868 in Zagreb.

The reader may be surprised to see such a quantity of old dictionaries of the Croatian language (various grammars are even more numerous). See a remark on the “Declaration about the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language“, written by outstanding intellectuals and most important cultural institutions in Zagreb in 1967.

According to Edward Stankiewicz (ed): Grammars and Dictionaries of the Slavic languages from the Middle Ages up to 1850: an annotated bibliography, Berlin, Mouton 1984, pp 77-93, Croatians have

• 43 grammars
• 45 dictionaries

The first etimological dictionary among the Slavs is Pravoslovnik by Petar Katancic (1750-1825), which has 1,473 pp (later renamed Etymologicon illyricum by Grgur Cevapovic). The manuscript contains 53,000 entries from A to Svemoguc. See [Franolic, p. 30].

The Croatian language was often designated under the name of Illyrian, Slavonian, Sclavonian, Dalmatian language. For example, rev Emerik Pavic in his 1778 translation of “Flos Medicinae” from Italian (it was the book about health care) wrote to be versified in “Croatian or Dalmatian language”. Croatian Franciscan Filip Grabovac (1699 – 1749) wrote a book Cvit razgovora naroda, i jezika ilirickoga, aliti arvackoga, published in Venice in 1747, that is, Flower of people’s speech, and of Illyric language, or Crotian.