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| Following the expulsion of the Jews from their land some 2,000 years ago, Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language. For centuries it was restricted to liturgy, religious study, poetry and tombstone inscriptions.
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Its revival began with the rise of Jewish nationalism in Europe in the mid-19th century. More and more literary works were written in Hebrew, and a growing number of people spoke it in daily life. Hebrew was recognized as one of the official languages of the British Mandate (1918-1948), along with English and Arabic. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), who pioneered the revival of Hebrew as a living language, initiated the Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, which eventually ran to 17 volumes. Hebrew vocabulary has grown from some 8,000 words in biblical times to more than 120,000 today.
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