Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755): Defining English

Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in London on 15 April 1755, was the most influential English dictionary before the Oxford English Dictionary. Compiled largely by one man over about nine years, it defined some 42,000 words and illustrated them with more than 100,000 quotations from English literature. For more than a century it was treated as the standard authority on what English words meant and how they should be spelled.

Background: a language without an authority

By the mid-18th century English had no official body to regulate it. France had the Académie française, founded in 1635, whose dictionary appeared in 1694, and Italy had the Accademia della Crusca. Many English writers, from Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope, worried that English was changing too fast and wanted it “fixed”.

There were already English dictionaries. Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604 explained hard words, and Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721 was popular and ran through many editions. None of them, however, had the authority or depth that readers wanted.

In 1746 a group of London booksellers, including Robert Dodsley, Andrew Millar and the Longman firm, saw a commercial opportunity. They approached Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), a struggling writer from Lichfield who had come to London in 1737. On 18 June 1746 he signed a contract to produce a comprehensive dictionary for 1,500 guineas.

The Plan and Lord Chesterfield

In 1747 Johnson published The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, addressed to Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, a statesman and patron of letters. Chesterfield gave him a small sum but little further help.

Shortly before the Dictionary appeared, Chesterfield wrote two essays praising the coming work. Johnson replied in February 1755 with a famous letter rejecting the earl’s belated patronage. He pointed out that he had completed the work without any help from a patron, and asked whether a patron was someone who watched a drowning man with indifference and then offered help once he had reached the shore. The letter is often seen as a turning point in the decline of literary patronage in Britain.

How the Dictionary was made

Johnson worked in the garret of his house at 17 Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where he lived from 1748. He was helped by six amanuenses, or copying assistants; according to James Boswell, five of them were Scots. They did not write definitions, which were Johnson’s own work.

Johnson’s method was new for English. He read widely in English literature, especially writers from Sir Philip Sidney in the late 16th century to the early 18th century, and marked passages that showed how words were used. The assistants copied these passages onto slips, which were sorted under the words they illustrated. Johnson then wrote definitions, often dividing a word into many numbered senses.

Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Bacon and the King James Bible were among the most quoted sources. Johnson generally avoided quoting living authors and writers whose religious or political views he disliked. He had promised the booksellers to finish in three years; in practice the Dictionary took about nine.

Publication and reception

The Dictionary appeared on 15 April 1755 in two large folio volumes, priced at 4 pounds 10 shillings, a large sum at the time. To add prestige to the title page, the University of Oxford awarded Johnson a Master of Arts degree shortly before publication. The first edition ran to 2,000 copies.

The actor David Garrick, Johnson’s former pupil, celebrated the achievement in a short poem claiming that Johnson alone had beaten the forty members of the French Academy. Reviews were largely respectful. Sales of the expensive folio were slow at first, but the abridged octavo edition of 1756 sold well, and the work made Johnson’s name. In 1762 he received a royal pension of 300 pounds a year.

Johnson revised the Dictionary substantially for the fourth edition of 1773. Many later editions, abridgements and adaptations followed in Britain and America.

Famous definitions

Johnson’s Dictionary is remembered for a handful of witty or opinionated definitions. Oats is defined as a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. A lexicographer is “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge”. Excise is described as a hateful tax, and pension is defined in hostile terms that later amused Johnson’s critics when he accepted one.

He also made mistakes and admitted them. He defined pastern, part of a horse’s leg, as the knee; when a woman asked him why, Boswell reports, he answered that it was pure ignorance. Some definitions are notoriously complex: network is “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”.

Johnson’s Preface to the Dictionary is itself admired as one of the finest pieces of English prose of the century. In it he describes the impossibility of perfection and the labour of the work, and says it was written in sickness and sorrow, a remark usually linked to the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in 1752.

The witty entries are a tiny minority. Most of the Dictionary consists of careful, clear definitions, carefully separated senses and illustrative quotations, which is why it remained useful for so long.

Myths and facts

Myth: Johnson wrote the first English dictionary. Dozens of English dictionaries existed before 1755. Johnson’s was distinctive for its scale, its method of illustrating usage with quotations and the quality of its definitions.

Myth: Johnson wanted to freeze the language. In the Plan of 1747 he hoped to “fix” English. By the Preface of 1755 he had changed his mind, writing that no dictionary could stop a living language from changing.

Myth: Johnson fixed English spelling single-handed. He mostly recorded the spellings already used by printers, and some of his choices, such as musick and publick, were later abandoned. His authority helped slow the variation in spelling rather than invent a new system.

Legacy

Johnson’s Dictionary was the leading authority on English until the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first part appeared in 1884 and which was completed in 1928. The OED adopted and greatly extended Johnson’s idea of using dated quotations to show how words are used.

In America, Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was partly a reaction against Johnson’s British authority. The Dictionary belongs to a wider 18th-century project of ordering knowledge, alongside works such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the first Encyclopaedia Britannica. Johnson’s house in Gough Square is now a museum.

Timeline

• 1746, 18 June: Johnson signs a contract with a group of London booksellers to write the Dictionary.
• 1747, August: The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language is published, addressed to Lord Chesterfield.
• 1748: Johnson moves to 17 Gough Square, where most of the work is done.
• 1755, February: Johnson writes his letter rejecting Chesterfield’s patronage; Oxford awards him a Master of Arts degree.
• 1755, 15 April: A Dictionary of the English Language is published in two folio volumes.
• 1756: An abridged octavo edition is published.
• 1773: The revised fourth edition appears.
• 1884: The first part of the Oxford English Dictionary is published, beginning the replacement of Johnson as the standard authority.

Why it matters

Johnson’s Dictionary gave English its first widely accepted reference work and showed how a language could be described through the evidence of its best writers. Its method shaped modern lexicography, and its witty entries keep it alive in popular memory.