Dictionary of Women Worldwide
reference work on women’s biographies
Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Throughout the Ages is a biographical dictionary of women. Published in 2006 by Yorkin Publications (an imprint of Gale), the three-volume Dictionary was intended to redress the paucity of information on women available in other biographical dictionaries. Editors Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer found that typically five percent or less of the text of such works was devoted to women.
The dictionary was the winner of the 2007 Best Reference Book Award from the American Library Association.
Content
The first two volumes of the dictionary contain entries on women across millennia and the third volume is devoted to indexes. The book also contains 85 genealogical charts. The dictionary does not contain author or source information; however, 10,000 entries refer the reader to the editors' 17-volume Women in World History which contains more detail. The Dictionary of Women Worldwide series served as an expansion of the prior multi-volume work, though the entries were made shorter in length by comparison.
Each entry generally contains biographical information including birth date and death date, occupation, any pseudonyms used and, if married, whom their spouse and children were, and then a general description of their life and accomplishments. The time span covered includes as far back as 3100 BC up through the 20th century.
“Dictionary of Women Worldwide” enters the record as reference work on women’s biographies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dictionary, Women and Worldwide can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Dictionary of Women Worldwide” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dictionary, Women and Worldwide provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q105802405. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006 and 2007.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dictionary of Women Worldwide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.