When Thomas Cooper set about revising Thomas Elyot's Latin-English dictionary Bibliotheca Eliotae, his aim was to ‘castigate’ and ‘augment’ the original to give ‘the true significacions of wordes’. Among the words that Cooper castigated and augmented was the Latin noun puella, whose entry Cooper expanded to provide a fuller, if not a truer, set of English equivalents. Where Elyot had given the English translation for puella simply as ‘a wench’ in 1542, Cooper gave the entry six years later as ‘a wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’. This extension was part of Cooper's overall attempt to give expanded translations for a number of Latin words, and the addition of ‘girl’ to entries related to puella was a consistent feature of Cooper's revisionary activity. To Elyot's entry for the Latin verb puellascere, ‘to wax yong again, to be maidenly’, Cooper added ‘to waxe gyrlyshe’, once again giving the word ‘girl’ as an alternative for puella. In addition to inserting ‘girl’ into Elyot's existing entries, Cooper supplemented the section of words related to puella with entries for puellariter, ‘lyke a wentche or gyrle’, and puellula, ‘a littell gyrle, a wentche’.