A compendium is a concise yet comprehensive compilation of a body of knowledge. A compendium may summarize a larger work. In most cases the body of knowledge will concern some delimited field of human interest or endeavour (for example, hydrogeology), while a "universal" encyclopedia can be referred to as a compendium of all human knowledge.

The word compendium comes from the Latin word compendere, meaning "to weigh together".

Examples

An example of a compendium might be the Oxford English Dictionary project which attempts to be a comprehensive compilation of words in the English Language. Other sites on the internet also have directories that could make some claim to this; Google's Directory, about.com, etc...

Links

//www.oed.com Oxford English Dictionary site

Kompendium | Compêndio | Compendiu | Компендиум (образование)