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Dictionary of the English Language : Preface by Samuel Johnson LEXILOGOS. Preface. (1 st edition, 1755) It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished ...
Apr 1, 2004 · 28 by Samuel Johnson. Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson. Read now or download (free!) Choose how to read this book Url
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May 6, 2021 · Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755, 1773. Edited by Beth Rapp Young, Jack Lynch, William Dorner, Amy Larner Giroux, Carmen Faye Mathes, and Abigail Moreshead. 2021. https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com Accession number from UF library catalog: ufl.021726818
- Johnson's Ambitions
- Johnson's Labors
- Unabridged and Abridged editions
- The Quotations
- The Definitions
- Rude Words
- Barbarisms
- Meanings
- Lessons Learned
In his "Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language," published in August 1747, Johnson announced his ambition to rationalize spellings, trace etymologies, offer guidance on pronunciation, and "preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom." Preservation and standardization were primary goals: "[O]ne great end of this underta...
In other European countries around this time, dictionaries had been assembled by large committees. The 40 "immortals" who made up the Académie française took 55 years to produce their French Dictionnaire. The Florentine Accademia della Crusca labored 30 years on its Vocabolario. In contrast, working with just six assistants (and never more than fou...
Weighing in at roughly 20 pounds, the first edition of Johnson's Dictionary ran to 2,300 pages and contained 42,773 entries. Extravagantly priced at 4 pounds, 10 shillings, it sold only a few thousand copies in its first decade. Far more successful was the 10-shilling abridged version published in 1756, which was superseded in the 1790s by a best-s...
Johnson's most significant innovation was to include quotations(well over 100,000 of them from more than 500 authors) to illustrate the words he defined as well as provide tidbits of wisdom along the way. Textual accuracy, it appears, was never a major concern: if a quotation lacked felicity or didn't quite serve Johnson's purpose, he'd alter it.
The most commonly cited definitions in Johnson's Dictionary tend to be quirky and polysyllabic: rust is defined as "the red desquamation of old iron"; cough is "a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity"; network is "any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." In truth, ma...
Though Johnson omitted certain words for reasons of propriety, he did admit a number of "vulgar phrases," including bum, fart, piss, and turd. (When Johnson was complimented by two ladies for having left out "naughty" words, he is alleged to have replied, "What, my dears! Then you have been looking for them?") He also provided a delightful selectio...
Johnson didn't hesitate to pass judgment on words he considered socially unacceptable. On his list of barbarisms were such familiar words as budge, con, gambler, ignoramus, shabby, trait, and volunteer (used as a verb). And Johnson could be opinionated in other ways, as in his famous (though not original) definition of oats: "a grain, which in Engl...
Not surprisingly, some of the words in Johnson's Dictionary have undergone a change in meaning since the 18th century. For example, in Johnson's time a cruise was a small cup, a high-flier was someone who "carries his opinions to extravagance," a recipe was a medical prescription, and a urinatorwas "a diver; one who searches under water."
In the preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson acknowledged that his optimistic plan to "fix" the language had been thwarted by the ever-changing nature of language itself: Ultimately Johnson concluded that his early aspirations reflected "the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer." But of course Samuel Johnson wa...
- Richard Nordquist
A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson. [2] It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language . There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers ...
A Dictionary of the English Language, the famous dictionary of Samuel Johnson, published in London in 1755; its principles dominated English lexicography for more than a century. This two-volume work surpassed earlier dictionaries not in bulk but in precision of definition. (Read H.L. Mencken’s.
Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language by Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784. Collection gutenberg Contributor Project Gutenberg Language English.
