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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.
Jan 31, 2019 · Updated on January 31, 2019. On April 15, 1755, Samuel Johnson published his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language. It wasn't the first English dictionary (more than 20 had appeared over the preceding two centuries), but in many ways, it was the most remarkable.
- Richard Nordquist
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.)
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sep 18, 2020 · Summary. 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.
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 Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English was originally conceived by F. G. Fowler and H. W. Fowler to be compressed, compact, and concise. Its primary source is the Oxford English Dictionary, and it is nominally an abridgement of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It was first published in 1924.
