The story of missionary lexicography in South America begins in the sixteenth century, with the Spanish–Quechua and Quechua–Spanish Lexicon, o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Peru of the Dominican friar Domingo de Santo Tomás, published in 1560; its first section contains about 6,000 entries, and its second about 4,000. Quechua had been the language of the Inca empire, and continued in widespread use after the fall of that empire, so that it was an important subject for dictionaries. The work of Santo Tomás was followed in 1586 by an anonymous Arte y vocabulario en la lengua general del Peru, presenting adaptations of his two wordlists (about 5,000 entries each) followed by a grammar.