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Early English dictionaries. 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.
In 1598, an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio was published. It was the first English dictionary to use quotations ("illustrations") to give meaning to the word; in none of these dictionaries so far were there any actual definitions of 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 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.
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The first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was compiled by English school teacher, Robert Cawdrey and published in London in 1604. However, it was found rather unreliable. The first edition of the dictionary was just 120 pages long and contained only 2,543 words, many of which were obscure. The primary focus of Cawdrey’s work were ...
Instead of 6,400 pages in four volumes as originally planned, the Dictionary culminated in ten volumes containing over 250,000 main entries and almost 2 million quotations. It was published under the imposing name A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles although it had also come to be known as the Oxford English Dictionary. Sadly ...
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.
