Samuel johnsons dictionary is best described as the first

Q: Was Samuel Johnsons dictionary the first?

Johnsons 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.

Q: What was the purpose of Samuel Johnsons dictionary?

A group of London booksellers first commissioned Johnsons dictionary, as they hoped that a book of this kind would help stabilise the rules governing the English language.

Q: Who is the first founder of dictionary?

Robert Cawdreys Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first single-language English dictionary ever published. It lists approximately 3000 words, defining each one with a simple and brief description.

Table of Contents Show

Was Samuel Johnson's dictionary the first?
What was the purpose of Samuel Johnson's dictionary?
Who is the first founder of dictionary?
Who wrote the first great dictionary?

Literature and Composition: Reading, Writing,Thinking

1st EditionCarol Jago, Lawrence Scanlon, Renee H. Shea, Robin Dissin Aufses

1,697 solutions

Technical Writing for Success

3rd EditionDarlene Smith-Worthington, Sue Jefferson

468 solutions

The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric

2nd EditionLawrence Scanlon, Renee H. Shea, Robin Dissin Aufses

661 solutions

Technical Writing for Success

3rd EditionDarlene Smith-Worthington, Sue Jefferson

468 solutions

Read from the Preface to Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language:

Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.

In 1746 Johnson entered into an agreement with a group of London booksellers to write an English dictionary, and began work the same year with only six assistants to aid him. A year later he published a plan for the dictionary in which he outlined his reasons for undertaking the project and explained exactly how he intended to compile his work (see left). Johnson projected that the scheme would take about three years, but he seriously underestimated the scale of the work involved, and in the end it took him three times this length of time to write over 40,000 definitions and select nearly 114,000 illustrative quotations from every field of learning and literature.

Although little is known about how Johnson actually assembled his Dictionary i.e. what sources he used to compile his word list or how he went about selecting the quotations, it has been established that he, like most other lexicographers, relied at least in part on the work of his predecessors. A general history of the English dictionary usually begins with Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604), but it is possible to trace the origins of the dictionary back a lot further than this.

Excerpt from the 'Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language' (Sp Coll Mu51-c.25, pp 4-5)

Title Page from 'Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language' (Sp Coll Mu51-c.25)

For nearly a century before Johnson embarked upon his Dictionary there had been a growing feeling within the upper echelons of society that there should be some sort of standardisation within the English language. As far back as 1664, the Royal Society set up a committee "for improving the English tongue" but it was the successful completion of the Dictionaire de l'Acad�mie Fran�aise thirty years later, that made the English truly realise the need for a greater study of their own language. From this point onwards many literary figures, including Defoe and Swift, proposed their own ideas and schemes for correcting the English Language but all of these failed in one way or another; it was not until 1747, when Johnson published his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, that the problem finally found someone who had the tenacity to embark upon a project comparable to that of the French Academy.

It is interesting to note that the aims of the booksellers and the aims of the author were very different when embarking upon a project as lengthy and perilous as a dictionary. The leading London booksellers were always open to investment in works that would be popular with the general public, especially dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The reasons for this were twofold: firstly, in the publishing of such a large work it was usually impractical for one booksellers to publish alone, and so they would often form temporary partnerships with each other, thereby sharing the costs and the risks alike; secondly, the copyright of such items usually belonged to the publisher, therefore once the initial outlay had been made to the compiler and the work was finished, booksellers could make massive profits as they no longer had to pay a percentage to the author.

Further on in the preface Johnson shows his own personal humility when he admits that there are some words which he just could not explain, simply because he didn't understand them (see below). The early lexicographers, by their very nature, were expected to be able to define even the most difficult word, so for Johnson to admit that he could not do this demonstrates a great sense of modesty. However, whilst it goes without saying that difficult words can be hard to understand, they can in fact be very easy to define. The real trouble that the early lexicographers had was in defining the simple words of the language, the words that were used on a daily basis in everyday speech. For example, Johnson defines the difficult sounding 'perspicacious' rather easily as "quicksighted; sharp of sight", whilst for the apparently simple word 'take', he finds a total of 113 different definitions and usages. By the mid-eighteenth century no one had even tried to define all the basic words of the language, so for Johnson to make such a thorough attempt at the first time of asking, and to do so with such a great sense of humility, was a vast achievement.

Excerpt from the Preface (B2r)

Letter 'O' from the Grammar of the English Language (a1v)

Also included in the Dictionary is a Grammar of the English Language. Johnson divided this into four sections: etymology (the study of the origin or history of words), syntax (the grammatical arrangement of words when forming sentences), prosody (the use of speech elements, such as pitch, rhythm and intonation), and perhaps most interestingly, orthography (the study of how sounds are written). Johnson separates his section on orthography into the letters of the alphabet and goes through each one, attempting to pinpoint exact rules of usage. An example of this, the letter 'o', is given opposite. Whilst what Johnson writes is accurate, it is often hard to understand - with so many different and often conflicting rules, it gives the impression that there is very little shape or consistent practice within the language. However, it has to be said that describing pronunciation in the mid-eighteenth century would have been very difficult. The phonetic alphabet (the method by which modern lexicographers transcribe the sounds of the language) did not begin development until 1886. Yet Johnson makes a valiant attempt at explaining pronunciation, by highlighting difficult or tricky words. For example, the word 'bough' one may think would end in a hard f, like 'trough', or have a u sound in the middle, like 'enough', but Johnson explains in his definition (see opposite) that "the gh is mute." However, the more troublesome part of explaining the 'ou' sound is completely ignored, a fact which Johnson accounts for in his Grammar of the English Language, stating that sometimes "use only can teach." Although Johnson's explanations of usage and pronunciation were not immediately complete or perfect, they certainly were a good attempt at clarifying one of the most difficult concepts of language, and were far and beyond what any previous lexicographer had attempted.

Definition of 'Bough' (3K2v)

As the Eighteenth Century rolled on and later editions of the Dictionary were published, the reviews of the work tended to get worse. Perhaps the most brutal attack came in a collection of ancient Scottish verses, which were later reprinted in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine of April 1800. The author suggested that Johnson did not know "what he ought to have studied before he wrote a Dictionary; much less how to write a Dictionary itself." He continued with his rampage claiming that "Any schoolmaster might have done what Johnson did. His Dictionary is merely a glossary to his own barbarous work." Such criticism was easy to fathom for those who sought things to attack: for some the definitions were seen as being overly simple and short, whilst for others they were too complicated; many believed that the quotations were irrelevant to the purpose of a dictionary, whilst some thought that such an idea was wonderful, but that Johnson had cited the wrong authors. However, these examples represent only a small percentage of the total number of reviews. Today we accept that the definitions are in fact the main strength of the Dictionary, whilst the quotations serve to morph the work into an extensive anthology of Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century English literature.

In style and efficacy the Dictionary was far and above anything that had previously been published in the English language and was so for over a century after its publication. It is very difficult to sum up the accomplishment of Johnson in compiling such an extensive work with so little help, in such a comparatively brief period of time. Yet of all the reviews and criticism surrounding the Dictionary in the mid-eighteenth century, the person who perhaps sums up the achievement best, is Johnson himself (see right).

Anecdote from 'The life of Samuel Johnson' (Sp Coll RQ 1976, Page 164)

Other Johnson Related Works:

A dictionary of the English language, 1756 (2nd Edition): Sp Coll Hunterian Dh.1.12-13

A dictionary of the English language, 1768 (3rd Edition): Sp Coll BD11-d.2

Dictionary of the English language, in miniature, 1815 (19th Edition): Sp Coll RB 3266

The plan of a dictionary of the English language, 1747: Sp Coll Mu51-c.25

Boswell, James The life of Samuel Johnson, 1793: Sp Coll RQ 1976

Other English Dictionaries held in Special Collections:Cockeram, Henry The English Dictionarie, 1658 (11th Edition): Sp Coll BD1-k.72

Blount, Thomas Glossographia, 1670 (3rd Edition): Sp Coll BG51-h.14

Coles, Elisha An English Dictionary, 1677 (1st Edition): Sp Coll BG51-h.17

Phillips, Edward The New World of Words, 1678 (4th Edition): Sp Coll Bk3-d.10

Cocker, Edward Cocker's English Dictionary, 1704 (1st Edition): Sp Coll BG51-h.24

Kersey, John Dictionarium Anglo-Brittanicum, 1715 (2nd Edition): Sp Coll BG51-g.6

Bailey, Nathan Et Al Dictionarium Britannicum, 1730 (1st Edition): Sp Coll BG51-a.7

Bailey, Nathan And Scott, Nicol A New Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 1764 (Reprinted New Edition): Sp Coll RF 288

See also the Dictionary Collection Web Page for further information on how to find dictionaries and similar material in Special Collections.

For more information about the collection in which Johnson's Dictionary is held, visit the Old Library Collection Web Page.

The following were useful in compiling this article:

Clifford, James L. Dictionary Johnson, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979: English LJ33 CLI2

DeMaria, Robert, Jr. Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986: English D617.J6 DEMAR

Lendinara, Patrizia Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Glossaries, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1999: English B174 LENDI

McAdam, E & Milne, George Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection, London: Victor Gollancz, 1963: English D628 JOH3

Reddick, Allen The Making of Johnson's Dictionary 1746-1773, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990: English D617.J6 RED

Sledd, James & Kolb, Gwin Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955: English D617.J6 SLE

Starnes, De Witt & Noyes, Gertrude The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604-1755, North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 1946: English D611 STA

Was Samuel Johnson's dictionary the first?

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.

What was the purpose of Samuel Johnson's dictionary?

A group of London booksellers first commissioned Johnson's dictionary, as they hoped that a book of this kind would help stabilise the rules governing the English language.

Who is the first founder of dictionary?

Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first single-language English dictionary ever published. It lists approximately 3000 words, defining each one with a simple and brief description.

Who wrote the first great dictionary?

Given that most scholars agree that this title belongs to Robert Cawdrey, whose 1604 work predates Johnson by more than 150 years, the answer would have to be that he did not. And yet the notion that Johnson, in 1755, was the first has persisted stubbornly.

samuel johnsons dictionary