 Title page from the second edition of theDictionary | |
| Author | Samuel Johnson |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Dictionary |
| Publisher | consortium |
Publication date | 15 April 1755 |
| Publication place | Great Britain |
| Pages | 2348[1] |
| Text | A Dictionary of the English Language atWikisource |
A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published asJohnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written bySamuel Johnson.[2][3] It is among the most influentialdictionaries in the history of theEnglish 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 1,500guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £310,000 in 2023.[4] 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 theOxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According toWalter 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".[5]
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 ofprinting andbookbinding, 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, includingRobert Dodsley and ThomasLongman – 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 yearsmore than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by SirThomas Elyot published in 1538.
The next to appear was byRichard 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..."[6] In 1598, an Italian–English dictionary byJohn 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'sTable Alphabeticall, published in 1604. Though it contained only 2,449 words, and no word beginning with the lettersW,X, orY, this was the first monolingual English dictionary. Several more dictionaries followed: inLatin, English, French and Italian.Benjamin Martin'sLingua Britannica Reformata (1749) andAinsworth'sThesaurus 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'sInterpreter, 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 byNathan 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. But perhaps the greatest single fault of these earlylexicographers was, as historianHenry Hitchings put it, that they "failed to give sufficient sense of [the English] language as it appearedin use."[7] In that sense Dr. Johnson's dictionary was the first to comprehensively document the English lexicon.
Johnson's dictionary was prepared at17 Gough Square, London, an eclectic household, between the years of 1746 and 1755. By 1747 Johnson had written hisPlan 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 tolegal 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.
Johnson'sPlan received the patronage ofPhilip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield but not to Johnson's pleasure.[8] Chesterfield did not care about praise, but was instead interested by Johnson's abilities.[9] Seven years after first meeting Johnson to discuss the work, Chesterfield wrote two anonymous essays inThe World that recommended theDictionary.[9] He complained that the English language was lacking structure and argued:
We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and choose a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr Johnson to fill that great and arduous post.[10]
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.[10] In a letter, Johnson explained his feelings about the matter:
Seven years, my lord, have now past since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before ... Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.[11]
A Dictionary of the English Language was somewhat large and very expensive. It was printed in-folio, meaning that the pages were 18 inches (46 cm) tall and nearly 20 inches (51 cm) wide. 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"Vasta mole superbus" ("Proud in its great bulk").[12] No bookseller could possibly hope to print this book without help; outside a fewspecial editions of the Bible no book of this heft and size had ever been set to type.
Thetitle page reads:
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,
AHISTORY of theLANGUAGE,
and ANENGLISH GRAMMAR.
BySAMUEL 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 4.6 mm "English"type, the text—double columned—was set in 3.5 mmpica. 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 themeanings of his words byliterary quotation, of which there are around 114,000. The authors most frequently cited by Johnson includeShakespeare,Milton andDryden. For example:
Furthermore, Johnson, unlike Bailey, added notes on a word's usage, rather than being merely descriptive.
Unlike most modernlexicographers, Johnson introduced humour or prejudice into quite a number of his definitions. Among the best-known are:
A couple of less well-known examples are:
He included whimsical little-known words, such as:
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:
The original goal was to publish the dictionary in twofolio 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 10 inches (25 cm) tall, and weighed in at nearly 21 pounds (9.5 kg).[citation needed] In addition to the sheer physical heft of Johnson's dictionary, came the equally hefty price: £4/10/– (equivalent to approximately £883 in 2023).[4] 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.[citation needed]
Johnson'setymologies 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 wasprescriptivist. It was also linguistically conservative, advocating traditional spellings such aspublick rather than the simpler spellings that would be favoured 73 years later byNoah Webster.
The dictionary is in alphabetical order according to the eighteenth-centuryEnglish 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.[21]
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'sWebster's Dictionary in 1828 and theOxford English Dictionary later in the same century.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Presentation by Jack Lynch onSamuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language, January 14, 2004,C-SPAN |
From the beginning there was universal appreciation not only of the content of theDictionary 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'."[22] "TheDictionary was considered, from the moment of its inception, to be Johnson's, and from the time of its completion it wasJohnson's Dictionary—his book and his property, his monument, his memorial."[23]
Immediately after publication "TheDictionary was enthusiastically written up in important periodicals such as theLondon Magazine and—none too surprisingly—theGentleman's Magazine. In the latter it received an eight-page notice".[24] Reviews, such as they were, proved generous in tone: "Of the less positive assessments the only properly judicious one came fromAdam Smith in the pro-WhigEdinburgh Review ... he wished that Johnson 'had oftener passed his own censure upon those words which are not of approved use, though sometimes to be met with in authors of no mean name'. Furthermore, Johnson's approach was not 'sufficiently grammatical'".[25]
Despite theDictionary's critical acclaim, Johnson's general financial situation continued in its dismal fashion for some years after 1755: "The image of Johnson racing to writeRasselas to pay for his mother's funeral, romantic hyperbole though it is, conveys the precariousness of his existence, almost four years after his work on theDictionary was done. His financial uncertainties continued. He gave up the house in Gough Square in March 1759, probably for lack of funds. Yet, just as Johnson was plunging into another trough of despondency, the reputation of theDictionary at last brought reward. In July 1762 Johnson was granted a state pension of £300 a year by the twenty-four-year-old monarch,George III. The pension did not make him rich, but it ensured he would no longer have to grub around for the odd guinea."[26]
As lexicography developed, faults were found with Johnson's work: "From an early stage there were noisy detractors. Perhaps the loudest of them wasJohn Horne Tooke ... Not content to pronounce it 'imperfect and faulty', he complained that it was 'one of the most idle performances ever offered to the public', that its author 'possessed not one single requisite for the undertaking', that its grammatical and historical parts were 'most truly contemptible performances', and that 'nearly one third ... is as much the language of theHottentots as of the English'."[27] "Horace Walpole summed up for the unbelievers when he pronounced at the end of the eighteenth century, 'I cannot imagine that Dr Johnson's reputation will be very lasting.' His dictionary was 'a surprising work for one man', but 'the task is too much for one man, and ... a society should alone pretend to publish a standard dictionary.' Notwithstanding Walpole's reservations, the admirers out-numbered the detractors, and the reputation of theDictionary was repeatedly boosted by other philologists, lexicographers, educationalists and word detectives."[28]
Johnson's dictionary was made whenetymology was largely based on guesswork. HisClassical leanings led him to prefer spellings that pointed to Latin or Greek sources, "while his lack of sound scholarship prevented him from detecting their frequent errors". For example, he preferred the spellingache overake as he wrongly thought it came from the Greekachos. Some of his spelling choices were also inconsistent: "while retaining the Latinp inreceipt he left it out ofdeceit; he spelleddeign one way anddisdain another; he spelleduphill butdownhil,muckhill butdunghil,instill butdistil,inthrall butdisenthral".[29]
Boswell[30] relates that "A lady once asked him [Johnson] how he came to definepastern as theknee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate reply, as she expected, he at once replied, 'Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.'" On the same page, Boswell notes that Johnson's definition ofnetwork ("Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections")[31] "has often been quoted with sportive malignity, as obscuring a thing in itself very plain."
Other than stress indication, the dictionary did not feature many word-specific orthoepical guidelines, with Johnson stating that 'For pronunciation, the best general rule is, to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written sounds' and referring to the irregular pronunciations as 'jargon'; this was subject to coetaneous criticism byJohn Walker, who wrote in the preface of hisCritical Pronouncing Dictionary 'It is certain, where custom is equal, this ought to take place; and if the whole body of respectable English speakers were equally divided in their pronunciation of the wordbusy, one half pronouncing itbew-ze, and the other halfbiz-ze, that the former ought to be accounted the most elegant speakers; but till this is the case, the latter pronunciation, though a gross deviation from orthography, will be esteemed the most elegant. Dr. Johnson's general rule, therefore, can only take place where custom has not plainly decided.'[32] Nevertheless, Walker scrupulously followed Johnson's explanations of words, as did many contemporary dictionaries.[33]
Despite the criticisms, "The influence of theDictionary was sweeping. Johnson established both a methodology for how dictionaries should be put together and a paradigm for how entries should be presented. Anyone who sought to create a dictionary, post-Johnson, did so in his shadow."[34] "In his history of theOxford English Dictionary,Simon Winchester asserts of its eighteenth-century predecessor that 'by the end of the century every educated household had, or had access to, the great book. So firmly established did it swiftly become that any request for "The Dictionary" would bring forth Johnson and none other.' 'One asked for The Dictionary,' writes Winchester, 'much as one might demand The Bible.'"[35] One of the first editors of theOED,James Murray, acknowledged that many of Johnson's explanations were adopted without change, for 'When his definitions are correct, and his arrangement judicious, it seems to be expedient to follow him.' ... In the end theOED reproduced around 1,700 of Johnson's definitions, marking them simply 'J.'."[36]
Johnson's influence was not confined to Britain and English: "The president of the Florentine Accademia declared that theDictionary would be 'a perpetual Monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general Benefit to the Republic of Letters'. This was no empty commendation. Johnson's work served as a model for lexicographers abroad. It is no surprise that his friendGiuseppe Baretti chose to make theDictionary the model for his Italian—English dictionary of 1760, and for his Spanish dictionary nearly two decades later.[37] But there are numerous examples of influence beyond Johnson's own circle. His work was translated into French and German."[38] And "In 1777, when Ferdinando Bottarelli published a pocket dictionary of Italian, French and English (the three languages side by side), his authorities for the French and Italian words were the works of the French and Italian academies: for the English he used Johnson."[39]
TheDictionary was exported to America. "The American adoption of theDictionary was a momentous event not just in its history, but in the history of lexicography. For Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century, Johnson was the seminal authority on language, and the subsequent development of American lexicography was coloured by his fame."[39] For American lexicographers theDictionary was impossible to ignore: "America's two great nineteenth-century lexicographers,Noah Webster andJoseph Emerson Worcester, argued fiercely over Johnson's legacy ... In 1789 [Webster] declared that 'Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer beour standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.'"[40] "Where Webster found fault with Johnson, Joseph Worcester saluted him ... In 1846 he completed hisUniversal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language. He defended Johnson's work, arguing that 'from the time of its publication, [it] has been, far more than any other, regarded as the standard for the language'."[41] Notwithstanding the evolution of lexicography in America, "TheDictionary has also played its part in the law, especially in the United States. Legislators are much occupied with ascertaining 'first meanings', with trying to secure the literal sense of their predecessors' legislation ... Often it is a matter of historicizing language: to understand a law, you need to understand what its terminology meant to its original architects ... as long asthe American Constitution remains intact, Johnson'sDictionary will have a role to play inAmerican law."[42]
Johnson's dictionary came out in two forms.
The first was the 1755Folio edition, which came in two large volumes on 4 April. The folio edition also features full literary quotes by those authors that Johnson quoted, such as Dryden and Shakespeare. It was followed a few weeks later by a second edition published in 165 weekly parts. The third edition was published in 1765, but it was the fourth, which came out in 1773 which included significant revisions by Johnson of the original work.[43]
TheAbridged edition came out in 1756 in twooctavo volumes with entries, "abstracted from the folio edition by the author",[44] laid out as two columns per page. The abridged version did not feature the literary quotes, just the author quoted. This made it cheaper to produce and buy. It sold over a thousand copies a year for the next 30 years bringing "The Dictionary" to the reach of every literate home.[45]
Johnson'sDictionary has been available in replica editions for some years. The entire firstFolio editions of 1755 1st edition and 1773 4th edition are available onJohnson's Dictionary Online, a project funded by theNational Endowment for the Humanities and created by a team of scholars at theUniversity of Central Florida. This version is the first fully searchable online edition.[46][47]
The Preface to theDictionary is available onProject Gutenberg.[48] In addition, scans of several editions can be found at theInternet Archive:
The compilation of Johnson'sDictionary was the main plot-line for anepisode ofBlackadder the Third where Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), after confounding the scholar with a barrage of fabricated nonexistent words, tries to conceal the destruction of the dictionary's manuscript. Johnson had given his only manuscript to the Prince and it was presumably destroyed by Blackadder's apprenticedogsbody Baldrick. The manuscript is later found intact, only for Johnson to discover he had forgotten to include the word "sausage". The episode ends with Baldrick throwing the dictionary into the fire.
"Dr. Johnson's Great Dictionary" appears as a plot device in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes film,The Pearl of Death, starringBasil Rathbone andNigel Bruce.[49]
At the end of Chapter 1 ofVanity Fair byWilliam Makepeace Thackeray Becky Sharp disdainfully throws a copy of Johnson'sDictionary out the window.
In Melville'sMoby Dick, the narrator mentions using Johnson's dictionary to aid him in his leviathanic undertaking: "Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me." (Chapter 104, The Fossil Whale)
the 1st folio edition [1755] has been the most accessible … the 4th edition [1773] … so thoroughly revised that any project of this kind would be incomplete without it.
I think I found something that he'll appreciate. It'sDr. Johnson's Great Dictionary, an early folio.
Plan and Preface ofA Dictionary of the English Language public domain audiobook atLibriVox| Life and topics | |
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