The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them.
The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them. From the seventeenth century when Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française, dictionary making has been earnest work indeed. In the English-speaking world, the early dictionaries were almost always the work of one man rather than a ponderous committee of academics, as was the pattern on the Continent. In a kind of instinctive recognition of the mongrel, independent, idiosyncratic genius of the English tongue, these dictionaries were often entrusted to people bearing those very characteristics themselves. Nowhere was this more gloriously true than in the person of the greatest lexicographer of them all, Samuel Johnson.
Johnson, who lived from 1709 to 1784, was an odd candidate for genius. Blind in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, by all accounts coarse in manner, he was an obscure scribbler from an impoverished provincial background when he was given a contract by the London publisher Robert Dodsley to compile a dictionary of English.
Johnson’s was by no means the first dictionary in English. From Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604 to his opus a century and a half later there were at least a dozen popular dictionaries, though many of these were either highly specialized or slight (Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall contained just 3,000 words and ran to barely a hundred pages). Many also had little claim to scholarship. Cawdrey’s, for all the credit it gets as the first dictionary, was a fairly sloppy enterprise. It gave the definition of aberration twice and failed to alphabetize correctly on other words.
The first dictionary to aim for anything like comprehensiveness was the Universal Etymological Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey, published in 1721, which anticipated Johnson’s classic volume by thirty-four years and actually defined more words. So why is it that Johnson’s dictionary is the one we remember? That’s harder to answer than you might think.
His dictionary was full of shortcomings. He allowed many spelling inconsistencies to be perpetuated—deceit but receipt, deign but disdain, hark but hearken, convey but inveigh, moveable but immovable. He wrote downhil with one l, but uphill with two; install with two l’s, but reinstal with one; fancy with an f, but phantom with a ph. Generally he was aware of these inconsistencies, but felt that in many cases the inconsistent spellings were already too well established to tamper with. He did try to make spelling somewhat more sensible, institutionalizing the differences between flower and flour and between metal and mettle—but essentially he saw his job as recording English spelling as it stood in his day, not changing it. This was in sharp contrast to the attitude taken by the revisers of the Académie Française dictionary a decade or so later, who would revise almost a quarter of French spellings.
There were holes in Johnson erudition. He professed a preference for what he conceived to be Saxon spellings for words like music, critic, and prosaic, and thus spelled them with a final k, when in fact they were all borrowed from Latin. He was given to flights of editorializing, as when he defined a patron as “one who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery” or oats as a grain that sustained horses in England and people in Scotland. His etymologies, according to Baugh and Cable, were “often ludicrous” and his proofreading sometimes strikingly careless. He defined a garret as a “room on the highest floor in the house” and a cockloft as “the room over the garret.” Elsewhere, he gave identical definitions to leeward and windward, even though they are quite obviously opposites.
Even allowing for the inflated prose of his day, he had a tendency to write passages of remarkable denseness, as here: “The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of our fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together.” Too little singly? I would wager good money that that sentence was as puzzling to his contemporaries as it is to us. And yet at least it has the virtue of relative brevity. Often Johnson constructed sentences that ran to 250 words or more, which sound today uncomfortably like the ramblings of a man who has sat up far too late and drunk rather too much port.
Yet for all that, his Dictionary of the English Language, published in two volumes in June 1755, is a masterpiece, one of the landmarks of English literature. Its definitions are supremely concise, its erudition magnificent, if not entirely flawless. Without a nearby library to draw on, and with appallingly little financial backing (his publisher paid him a grand total of just £1,575, less than £200 a year, from which he had to pay his assistants), Johnson worked from a garret room off Fleet Street, where he defined some 43,000 words, illustrated with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of literature. It is little wonder that he made some errors and occasionally indulged himself with barbed definitions.
He had achieved in under nine years what the forty members of the Académie Française could not do in less than forty. He captured the majesty of the English language and gave it a dignity that was long overdue. It was a monumental accomplishment and he well deserved his fame.
