Faust Vrančić, Jakov Mikalja, Juraj Habdelić, Ljudevit Lalić, Pavao Ritter Vitezović, Ardelio Della Bella, Ivan Belostenec, Franjo Sušnik and Andrija Jambrešić are several names of great Croatian lexicographers who, along with their work, made a significant impact on development and standardization of Croatian language. Each one of these authors, through their dictionaries, contributed to the development of cultural, but also of national identity, and since they worked in times of national awakening, they present one of the key sources of studying the language situation of that time. The special feature of these authors' dictionaries lies in the fact that most of them were commited to writing multilingual dictionaries, within which they included languages important for Croatian areas. Latin, as the official language of a large number of European countries at the time, was part of each of these dictionaries. Based on the analysis of each dictionary separately, this paper tries to show the importance of Latin language and define the role it played in the formation of the standard Croatian language which we use today.