A Dictionary of the English Language

A Dictionary of the English Language
Samuel Johnson · Public domain · source
Name	A Dictionary of the English Language
Author	Samuel Johnson
Country	Kingdom of Great Britain
Language	English
Subject	Dictionary
Published	1755
Publisher	W. Strahan; T. Cadell

Contents

A Dictionary of the English Language was compiled by Samuel Johnson and published in 1755, becoming a landmark in British literature and Lexicography during the Age of Enlightenment. It influenced figures from Samuel Richardson and Oliver Goldsmith to William Wordsworth and Noam Chomsky, and affected institutions such as the Royal Society, the University of Oxford, and the British Museum.

Background and Publication

Johnson began work in London amid networks including Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, James Boswell, and patrons like Henry Thrale and George III. The project intersected with printers and booksellers such as William Strahan, Thomas Cadell, Andrew Millar, Robert Dodsley, and the political sphere represented by figures like William Pitt the Elder and Lord Bute. Influences on the enterprise traced to earlier lexicographers and writers including Noah Webster, Robert Cawdrey, Edward Phillips, Francis Bacon, and John Milton as well as continental scholars associated with the Encyclopédie and the Académie Française.

The dictionary arranged entries alphabetically and combined definitions, etymologies, and illustrative quotations drawn from authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope. Johnson cited sources including Homer and Virgil alongside contemporaries like Samuel Johnson's own essays and the works of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, John Dryden, and Thomas Gray. Entries varied from single-word glosses to extended articles referencing texts by Homeric translators, Isaac Newton, John Locke, and David Hume to exemplify usage and meaning.

Johnson's editorial principles balanced prescriptive commentary with descriptive quotation, drawing on manuscripts, printed books, and correspondence from collectors such as Tobias Smollett, Percy Bysshe Shelley (posthumous readers), and holdings in the Bodleian Library, the British Museum, and private libraries of Lord Chesterfield and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He relied on comparative evidence from Latin and Greek authorities including Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil and engaged with contemporary scholarship by Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and John Wilkins.

Contemporary reaction spanned the social network of Samuel Johnson's acquaintances—James Boswell, Edmund Burke, and David Garrick—and critics associated with periodicals like the Gentleman's Magazine, the London Magazine, and the Spectator. Parliamentarians and ministers such as William Pitt the Elder and cultural figures including William Blake, William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Percy Shelley commented on its authority. The dictionary shaped debates in academic bodies like the Royal Society and the University of Cambridge and influenced legal rhetoric in courts presided over by judges such as William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield.

Initial editions by W. Strahan and T. Cadell (1755) were followed by revised printings and abridgments issued by publishers including Longman, Oxford University Press, HarperCollins (later appropriations), and independent editors such as Henry John Todd and Charles Richardson. Nineteenth-century adaptations intersected with lexicographical projects led by Noah Webster, James Murray and institutions behind the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary Society of North America; nineteenth- and twentieth-century reprints circulated among collectors and scholars including Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and T. S. Eliot.

The work established standards that informed successors from Noah Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary team led by James Murray to modern digital enterprises connected to Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and academic projects at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Cambridge. Its blend of quotation-based definition, etymological attention, and literary exemplification influenced later editors such as Henry Sweet, William Chester Minor, Walter Skeat, and institutions like the British Library and the Linguistic Society of America. Johnson's dictionary remains a touchstone in studies by scholars including Harold Bloom, R. W. Burchfield, Alison Booth, and Ralph McKenzie.

Category:1755 books