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  1. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › A_Dictionary_of_theA Dictionary of the English Language - Wikipedia

    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.

  2. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Early_English_dictionariesEarly English dictionaries - Wikipedia

    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.

  3. www.dictionary.com › e › johnsonDid One Man Write The First Great English Dictionary All By ...

    Sep 17, 2018 · We’d like to take a moment to celebrate the man behind A Dictionary of the English Language, the first definitive English dictionary, the famous Samuel Johnson. A Dictionary of the English Language, also called Johnson’s Dictionary, was first published in 1775 and is viewed with reverence by modern lexicographers.

  4. www.britannica.com › summary › dictionaryHistory and development of dictionaries | Britannica

    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.

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  6. www.britannica.com › topic › A-Dictionary-of-theA Dictionary of the English Language | Definition & Facts

    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

  7. www.cambridge.org › core › booksChapter 12 - Samuel Johnson and the ‘First English Dictionary’

    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.

  8. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › DictionaryDictionary - Wikipedia

    In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete.