In 1913, Robert Whitwell, a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary,[1] petitioned the British Academy to use the imminent International Congress of Historical Studies to propose a replacement for the standard dictionary of medieval Latin, Du Cange's Glossarium (1678).

[2] Whitwell's idea was taken up in 1920 by the new International Union of Academies, which decided in 1924 that member academies should produce dictionaries based on those medieval Latin texts produced in geographic areas corresponding to their respective present-day territories, whilst also furnishing the material for an international Novum Glossarium.

[3] To this end, the British Academy appointed two committees to direct the collection of quotations, one covering the sixth to eleventh centuries for the Novum Glossarium and the other covering 1066 to 1600 for a dictionary of "late medieval British Latin".

By 1932 the academy felt that they could usefully publish the first fruits of the project, which appeared in 1934 as the Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources, prepared by J. H. Baxter and Charles Johnson.

In 2016 the whole DMLBS was published online, under licence from the British Academy.