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Borrowed from New Latinencyclopędīa(“general education”), variant of encyclopaedīa, a univerbated form of Koine Greekἐγκύκλιος παιδείᾱ(enkúklios paideíā, “education in the circle of arts and sciences”), from Ancient Greekἐγκύκλιος(enkúklios, “circular”) + παιδείᾱ(paideíā, “childrearing; education”), q.v. (The Old Latin diphthong /ai̯/ (Classical /ae̯/) had coalesced into /ɛː/ and subsequently merged with long /eː/ by the time the Greek loanword entered Neo-Latin. Since Classical and post-Classical orthography rarely marked vowel length, long /eː/ was often represented by a simple <e>. In cases in which it was derived from the earlier diphthong, writers occasionally used <ę>, which may have originated from the <æ> ligature.) Nearly all modern English use of the word influenced by the scope and format of Diderot & al.'s FrenchEncyclopédie.
A comprehensivereference work (often spanning several printed volumes) with articles (usually arranged in alphabetical order, or sometimes arranged by category) on a range of subjects, sometimes general, sometimes limited to a particular field.
I only use the library for the encyclopedia, as we’ve got most other books here.
His life's work is a four-volume encyclopedia of aviation topics.
The spelling encyclopedia is standard in American English, common in Canadian English, accepted in Australian and International English, and also very common in British English although nonstandard. Oxford spelling prefers the etymologized form encyclopaedia, which restores the αι diphthong in Ancient Greek παιδεία. The variant with the æ ligature still appears in the titles of some encyclopaedic works, but it is otherwise archaic in ordinary usage.
Tibetan: ཤེས་བྱ་ཀུན་ཁྱབ་མཛོད(shes bya kun khyab mdzod, literally “treasury of the universally knowable”), རིག་མཛོད(rig mdzod, literally “knowledge treasury”)(non-standard, but now used to translate “-pedia” in “Wikipedia”)
encyclopedia on Wikipedia.Wikipedia 