A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson.Advertisement in Derby Mercury 4 April 1755, page 4 'This day is published a Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson' It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.
There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £ in . Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.
Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson, Ch. 15, "Storming the Main Gate: The Dictionary". New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Background In earlier times, books had been regarded with something approaching veneration, but by the mid-eighteenth century this was no longer the case. The rise of literacy among the general public, combined with the technical advances in the mechanics of printing and bookbinding, meant that for the first time, books, texts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers were widely available to the general public at a reasonable cost. Such an explosion of the printed word demanded a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling for those words. This could be achieved by means of an authoritative dictionary of the English language. In 1746, a consortium of London's most successful printers, including Robert Dodsley and Thomas Longman – none could afford to undertake it alone – set out to satisfy and capitalise on this need by the ever-increasing reading and writing public.
Johnson's dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.
The next to appear was by Richard Mulcaster, a headmaster, in 1583. Mulcaster compiled what he termed "a generall table [of eight thousand words] we commonlie use...[yet] It were a thing verie praise worthy...if som well learned...would gather all words which we use in the English tung...into one dictionary..."Hitchings 2005, London p. 48; New York p. 53 In 1598, an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio was published. It was the first English dictionary to use quotations ("illustrations") to give meaning to the word; in none of these dictionaries so far were there any actual definitions of words. This was to change, to a small extent, in schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604. Though it contained only 2,449 words, and no word beginning with the letters W, X, or Y, this was the first monolingual English dictionary. Several more dictionaries followed: in Latin, English, French and Italian. Benjamin Martin's Lingua Britannica Reformata (1749) and Ainsworth's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1737) are both significant, in that they define entries in separate senses, or aspects, of the word. In English (among others), John Cowell's Interpreter, a law dictionary, was published in 1607, Edward Phillips' The new world of English words came out in 1658 and a dictionary of 40,000 words had been prepared in 1721 by Nathan Bailey, though none was as comprehensive in breadth or style as Johnson's.
The problem with these dictionaries was that they tended to be little more than poorly organised and poorly researched glossaries of "hard words": words that were technical, foreign, obscure or antiquated. Perhaps the greatest single fault of these early lexicographers was, as historian Henry Hitchings put it, that they "failed to give sufficient sense of [the English] language as it appeared in use."Hitchings 2005, London p. 49; New York p. 55 In that sense Dr. Johnson's dictionary was the first to comprehensively document the English lexicon.
Johnson's preparation
Johnson's dictionary was prepared at 17 Gough Square, London, an eclectic household, between the years of 1746 and 1755. By 1747 Johnson had written his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, which spelled out his intentions and proposed methodology for preparing his document. He clearly saw benefit in drawing from previous efforts, and saw the process as a parallel to legal precedent (possibly influenced by Cowell):
Johnson's Plan received the patronage of Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield but not to Johnson's pleasure.Lane pp. 117–118 Chesterfield did not care about praise, but was instead interested by Johnson's abilities.Lane p. 118 Seven years after first meeting Johnson to discuss the work, Chesterfield wrote two anonymous essays in The World that recommended the Dictionary. He complained that the English language was lacking structure and argued:
However, Johnson did not appreciate the tone of the essay, and he felt that Chesterfield had not made good on his promise to be the work's patron. In a letter, Johnson explained his feelings about the matter:
The text A Dictionary of the English Language was somewhat large and very expensive. It was printed as a folio, measuring (). The paper was of the finest quality available, the cost of which ran to nearly £1,600, more than Johnson had been paid to write the book. Johnson himself pronounced the book ("Proud in its enormous bulk").Hitchings 2005, London p. 195; New York p. 209 No bookseller could possibly hope to print this book without help; outside a few special editions of the Bible no book of this heft and size had ever been set to type.
The title page reads:
The words "Samuel Johnson" and "English Language" were printed in red; the rest was printed in black. The preface and headings were set in 4.6 mm "English" type, the text—double columned—was set in a typeface like Caslon. Available at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/21116/ This first edition of the dictionary contained a 42,773-word list, to which only a few more were added in subsequent editions. One of Johnson's important innovations was to illustrate the meanings of his words by literary quotation, of which there are around 114,000, from around 500 authors.Hitchings 2005, p. 97 The authors most frequently cited by Johnson include Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. For example:
OPULENCE
Wealth; riches; affluence
"There in full opulence a banker dwelt, Who all the joys and pangs of riches felt; His sideboard glitter'd with imagin'd plate, And his proud fancy held a vast estate." -- Jonathan Swift
Furthermore, Johnson, unlike Bailey, added notes on a word's usage, rather than being merely descriptive.
Unlike most modern lexicographers, Johnson introduced humour or prejudice into quite a number of his definitions. Among the best-known are: "Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid"See online copy of sixth edition "Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words"See online copy of sixth edition "Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"See online copy of sixth edition
A couple of less well-known examples are: "Monsieur: a term of reproach for a Frenchman"See online copy of sixth edition "Patron: One who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery."See onlike copy of sixth edition which some have understood to be a jab at his patron Philip Stanhope.Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman. HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.
He included whimsical little-known words, such as: "Writative – A word of Pope's, not to be imitated: "Increase of years makes men more talkative but less writative; to that degree I now write letters but of plain how d'ey's.""Kacirk, Jeffrey, Forgotten English, 21 May (page)
On a more serious level, Johnson's work showed a heretofore unseen meticulousness. Unlike all the proto-dictionaries that had come before, painstaking care went into the completeness when it came not only to "illustrations" but also to definitions as well: "Turn" had 16 definitions with 15 illustrations "Time" had 20 definitions with 14 illustrations "Put" ran more than 5,000 words spread over 3 pages "Take" had 134 definitions, running 8,000 words, over 5 pagesHitchings 2005, London p. 87; New York p. 93
The original goal was to publish the dictionary in two folio volumes, A–K and L–Z, but that soon proved unwieldy, unprofitable, and unrealistic. Subsequent printings ran to four volumes; even these formed a stack tall, and weighed in at nearly . In addition to the sheer physical heft of Johnson's dictionary, came the equally hefty price: £4/10/– (equivalent to approximately £ in ). So discouraging was the price that by 1784, thirty years after the first edition was published, when the dictionary had by then run through five editions, only about 6,000 copies were in circulation—an average sale of 200 books a year for thirty years.
Johnson's etymologies would be considered poor by modern standards, and he gave little guide to pronunciation; one example being "Cough: A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity. It is pronounced coff". Much of his dictionary was prescriptivist. It was also linguistically conservative, advocating traditional spellings such as publick rather than the simpler spellings that would be favoured 73 years later by Noah Webster.
The dictionary is in alphabetical order according to the eighteenth-century English alphabet. In the eighteenth century, the letters I and J were considered different forms of the same letter; the same with letters U and V. As a result, in Johnson's dictionary the word jargon comes before the word idle, and vagabond comes before ultimate.Guide to Dictionary , Johnson's Dictionary Online]
In spite of its shortcomings, the dictionary was far and away the best of its day. Its scope and structure were carried forward in dictionaries that followed, including Noah Webster's Webster's Dictionary in 1828 and the Oxford English Dictionary later in the same century.
Reception history
Initial reception From the beginning there was universal appreciation not only of the content of the Dictionary but also of Johnson's achievement in single-handedly creating it: "When Boswell came to this part of Johnson's life, more than three decades later, he pronounced that 'the world contemplated with wonder so stupendous a work achieved by one man, while other countries had thought such undertakings fit only for whole academies'."Hitchings 2005, p. 198 "The Dictionary was considered, from the moment of its inception, to be Johnson's, and from the time of its completion it was Johnson's Dictionary—his book and his property, his monument, his memorial."Hitchings 2005, p. 200