Rev. James Wood compiled this dictionary over three years, publishing it in London in 1893. His aim was to gather wisdom from a wider area than existing collections — ancient and modern, English and foreign — with particular attention to contemporary writers who had not yet been quarried in at all.
Wood made a deliberate choice not to supply chapter and verse for his sources, judging it not worth the labour when the quotations are perfectly intelligible in their own light. This explains the brief attributions throughout: an author's name, a language tag, or simply Pr. for proverb.
The arrangement is alphabetical by the first word of each entry — not by topic. Entries range from bare Latin mottos to extended passages from Goethe, Shakespeare, and Carlyle.