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Before Samuel Johnson's two-volume A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 and considered the most authoritative and influential work of early English lexicography, there were other early English dictionaries: more than a dozen had been published during the preceding 150 years. This article lists the most significant ones.
But that lineage is wrong: Robert Cawdrey published his Table Alphabeticall in 1604, 149 years before Johnson’s tome, and it is now republished here for the first time in over 350 years.
Now with that in mind, let's not downplay the establishment of Noah Webster and his first American English dictionary, first published in 1804, or the even bigger and expanded dictionary that Webster began working on soon after, to be published in 1828 with over sixty-five thousand words.
The first purely English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604), treating some 3,000 words. In 1746–47 Samuel Johnson undertook the most ambitious English dictionary to that time, a list of 43,500 words.
Sep 25, 2017 · In 1806, 20 years after his book tour, he published the first major American dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. A larger, more complete volume, An American Dictionary of the English Language, appeared in 1828, defining 12,000 Americanisms not previously recorded, such as iceberg, glacier, and magnetize.
- Rosemarie Ostler
Sep 18, 2020 · Noah Webster’s first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) was the first significant dictionary by an American. His blue-backed speller, The American Spelling Book (1783) was already, after the Bible, the most popular book ever published in America.
Sep 18, 2020 · The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries - September 2020. To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account.
