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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.
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.
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.
Johnson's dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.
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Authoring Institution: N/A. Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A. The first true English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey's "A Table Alphabeticall," published in 1604.
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 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)
Sep 18, 2020 · Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) has long had a reputation as the ‘first English dictionary’, despite the dozens of dictionaries that had appeared in the century and a half before Johnson’s.
