Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary
The Book That Imposed Order on the English Language in 1755
Sep 18, 2009
Three hundred years ago today, on the 18th September 1709, a child was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire who would go on to play a major role in the development and standardisation of the English Language.
Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall
In the 1700s, English was a very different language from the one we know today. A few dictionaries had already attempted to impose some order on a sprawling language that had borrowed words at will for over a thousand years, but with limited success. Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall was published in 1604 and provided spellings for just over 2500 words, but it would be another 150 years before Johnson's work attempted a more complete survey of the language.
Johnson's dictionary took over nine years to produce, and has been recognised as being the work of just one remarkable man. He was approached by a group of London booksellers and publishers in 1746, who requested he undertake the production of a dictionary that would do the English Language justice. Johnson's approach was to read over 2000 works of classic literature - Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and so on - and use these to help him compile his reference work.
Language in Use
The result was a labour of love that included over 42,000 words along with their definitions. What marks Johnson's dictionary out from its predecessors is the sheer amount of detail provided for each word, with page after page of alternative meanings for the most common words and phrases in the language. He also showed examples of the words in use, using quotations from the works of literature he had previously surveyed.
Of course, Johnson's status as a private writer, without access to academic libraries and resources, meant that some aspects of the dictionary were limited; for example, many words have scant etymological information provided. It is also unfortunate that many of the definitions for which Johnson is best remembered are those in which his own opinions and personality colour the objectivity of the explanations; "Oats", for example, are defined as "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people". Johnson also disapproved of rude words and of foreign words, so his solution was to recommend that they not be used, or to simply omit them from his dictionary altogether.
Still, without Johnson there would be no Oxford English Dictionary: his 1755 work provided the basis for this standard work of reference, and indeed around 1700 of his definitions were used word-for-word by the OED when it finally replaced Johnson's opus some 150 years later.
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