A Dictionary of the English Language

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A Dictionary of the English Language, one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language, was prepared by Samuel Johnson and published on April 15, 1755. The dictionary responded to a widely felt need for stability in the language. Calls and proposals for a new dictionary had been made for decades before a group of London booksellers (including Robert Dodsley and Thomas Longman) contracted Johnson in June, 1746 to prepare the work for the sum of £1575. Though he expected to be finished in three years, it took Johnson nearly nine years to complete. Remarkably, he did so singlehandedly, with only clerical assistance to copy out the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson prepared several revised editions during his life.

Contents 1 Background 2 Johnson's preparation 3 What was this book like? 3.1 Miscellaneous 4 Cultural references 5 References 5.1 Books 5.2 Online

Background

Whereas even one hundred years before books had been regarded with near veneration, 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, meant that for the first time books, texts, maps, pamphlets, newspapers, etc. were widely available to the general public at a reasonable cost. Such an explosion of the printed word demanded a set pattern of grammar, defination, and spelling for those words. This need, in turn, demanded a dictionary -- an authoritive dictionary of the English language unlike any ever seen before. And it was in 1745 that a consortium of London's most successful printers, for none could afford to undertake this alone, set out to fill, and capitalize on, this need by the ever increasing reading, and writing, public.

Contrary to what many think, Johnson's dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen; over the previous 150 years upwards of twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the most ancient of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

The next to appear was by Richard Mulcaster, headmaster, in the year 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..."^[1]

In 1598 came the publication of an Italian-English dictionary by John Florio. It was the first English dictionary to use quotes ("illustrations") to give meaning to the word; surprisingly,in none of these dictionaries so far to date, were there any defination(s) of actual 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 either the letters W, X, or Y, this was the first monolingual English dictionary.

Several more dictionaries were to follow: Dictionaries written in Latin, English, French and Italian prior to Johnson. 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 trouble with these dictionaries was that they tended to be little more than poorly organized, poorly researched, glosseries of "hard words"; words that were technical, foreign, obsure, antiquated, etc. But perhaps the greatest single fault of these early lexicographers was, as one historian put it, that they "failed to give sufficient sense of [the English] language as it appeared in use."^[2]

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):

"I shall therefore, since the rules of stile, like those of law, arise from precedents often repeated, collect the testimonies of both sides, and endeavour to discover and promulgate the decrees of custom, who has so long possessed whether by right or by usurpation, the sovereignty of words."

What was this book like?

It wasn't like anything ever seen before in the world. To start with, Johnson's dictionary was big and it was expensive -- very big, and very expensive. Johnson himself pronounced the book "Vasta mole superbus" ("Proud in its great bulk")^[3] No bookseller -- not even London's most successful -- 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 even been set to type. The cost of the paper alone would run nearly £1,600; more than what Johnson had even been paid to write the book.

So what did Johnson's dictionary look like? First of all its pages were 1½ feet tall and nearly 20 inches wide. The paper was of the finest quality available. The title page read:

A
DICTIONARY
of the
English Language:
in which
The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS,
and
ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS
by
EXAMPLES from the best WRITERS.
To which are prefixed
and AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR.
By SAMUEL JOHNSON, A.M.
In TWO Volumes
VOL. I

The words "Samuel Johnson" and "English Language" were printed in red; the rest was printed in black. The preface and headings were set in 4.6mm "English" type, the text -- double columned -- was set in 3.5mm pica. This first edition of the dictionary contained a 42,773 word list, to which only a few more were added in subsequent editions, together with approximately 50,000 "ilustrations", by Johnson's was to illustrate the meanings of his words by literary quotation, of which there are around 114,000. 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 pround 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…"
• "Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge…",and
• "Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people".

On a more serious level, Johnson's work showed a heretofore unseen meticulousness. Unlike all previous proto-dictionaries that had come before, painstaking care went into the completeness when it came not only to "illustrations" but to definitions as well:

• The word "turn" had 16 definitions with 15 illustrations
• The word "time" had 20 definitions with 14 illustrations
• The word "put" ran more than 5,000 words spread over 3 pages
• The word "take" had 134 definitions, running 8,000 words, over 5 pages ^[4]

The original goal was to publish the dictionary in two volumes: A-K and L-Z, but that soon proved unwieldy, unprofitable, and unrealistic. Subsequent printings ran to four volumes; even these stacked one on top of the other stood 10 inches tall, and weighed in at nearly 21 pounds. In addition to the sheer physical heft of Johnson's dictionary, came the equally hefty price: £4.10s. ($8,000?). So discouraging was the price that by 1784, thirty years after the first editions was published, and had since run through five editions, only about 6,000 copies were in circulation -- an average sale of twenty book 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 unashamedly prescriptivist, and it was also linguistically conservative, advocating traditional spellings, for example olde, rather than the simplifications that would be favored 73 years later by Noah Webster. In spite of whatever shortcomings it might have had, the dictionary was far and away the best of its day, a milestone in English-language lexicography to which all modern dictionaries owe some gratitude. Johnson's dictionary was still considered authoritative until the appearance of the Oxford English Dictionary at the end of the nineteenth century.

Miscellaneous

The first edition of the dictionary appeared in two folio volumes. As of 2002 a first edition might sell for US$25,000 to US$30,000, but many later editions and facsimiles have appeared. In 1995, in the UK, a facsimile of the first edition cost £200 (approximately US$300). Contemporary selections from Johnson's dictionary are available in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, ISBN 0-8027-1421-8.

A CD-ROM version is currently available for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems (N.B. For system 9, not for OS X) from Cambridge University Press, featuring the first (1755) and fourth (1773) editions, viewable in both facsimile and searchable text form. A later (1828) version of the dictionary, in the public domain, has been scanned and made available online.

Cultural references

Johnson and the dictionary are the central theme of the third series Blackadder episode "Ink and Incapability", which centres around Johnson's (performed by Robbie Coltrane) attempts to get George IV's patronage. When Baldrick accidentally uses Johnson's manuscript as kindling, Blackadder must rewrite it in one night, lest he and Baldrick be found out by Johnson or his apprentices Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Byron and Percy Shelley.

References

Books

• James L. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson's Middle Years (1979)
• Henry Hitchings, Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World (2005)
• Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language (2002)

Online

• A Dictionary of the English Language on CD-ROM [1]
• "Words count" from The Guardian 2nd April 2005 [2]
• Brief history of English lexicography [3]