Madeline Kripke, who kept one of the world’s largest private collection of dictionaries, much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment died April 25 in Manhattan. She was 76. The cause was the coronavirus and complications of pneumonia.

Ms. Kripke, her father a rabbi and her mother a writer of children’s religious books, told Daniel Krieger for a profile about her on the website Narratively, that the Webster’s Collegiate she received from her parents when she was in the 5th grade “unlocked the world for me because I could read at any vocabulary level I wanted.” Beginning with the Webster’s Collegiate, she accumulated an estimated 20,000 volumes as diverse as a Latin dictionary printed in 1502 and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 1980 guide to pickpocket slang.

As a young collector, she once coveted a 1694 edition of The Ladies Dictionary, which she had found in a London shop at a time when she had only enough money for a planned train trip to France to meet a friend in Nice. She bought the book and hitchhiked to Nice instead.