Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: The Book That Defined English

Why Johnson's Dictionary Mattered

When A Dictionary of the English Language reached London booksellers on April 15, 1755, English gained something it had long lacked: a major reference work that treated its vocabulary with literary judgment, scholarly ambition, and remarkable scale. Samuel Johnson, then 45, had spent nine years preparing roughly 42,773 entries. The finished two-volume work did far more than list meanings. It arranged English words, explained them, and supported them with examples in a way no earlier English dictionary had matched.

The book was neither the first dictionary of English nor the biggest dictionary ever attempted. Its distinction lay elsewhere: in the clarity of many definitions, the power of its quotations, and the unmistakable intelligence of the author behind them. For more than 150 years, Johnson's work stood as the leading English dictionary, and its methods became central to the later story of dictionary making in English and in other languages.

The Writer Who Took On English

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) ranks among the most important literary figures of the 18th century. He was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the son of a bookseller and an educated mother. Books were everywhere in his childhood, but comfort was not. Johnson dealt with poverty, serious physical difficulties, partial blindness, hearing loss, and what is now often thought to have been Tourette syndrome. He also suffered periods of deep depression.

He entered Oxford University but left without taking a degree because he could not afford to continue. Over the years he worked as a teacher, journalist, essayist, poet, and parliamentary reporter. His poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and his essay periodical The Rambler (1750–1752) helped build his reputation. Even so, money was a persistent problem, and the dictionary contract offered not only a grand intellectual task but also badly needed income.

Much of what later generations know about Johnson's force of personality comes from James Boswell, his friend and biographer. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) remains one of the great biographies in English. In its pages, Johnson appears as a brilliant talker: sharp, funny, stubborn, humane, and endlessly quotable. Those same traits—learning, wit, judgment, and verbal precision—served him well when he turned to defining English words.

How the Dictionary Began

By the middle of the 18th century, many educated English speakers felt that their language lacked the kind of authoritative dictionary already available for several European languages. The Académie française had issued its official dictionary in 1694, while the Accademia della Crusca had published an Italian dictionary in 1612. English had dictionaries, but most were narrow works devoted mainly to difficult or unusual words rather than the common vocabulary of everyday writing and speech.

In 1746, several leading London booksellers—what we would now call publishers—asked Johnson to prepare a comprehensive dictionary of English. Their offer was 1,575 guineas, roughly equivalent to $300,000 today. It sounded generous, but it had to support years of work and pay assistants as well. Johnson agreed, and in June 1746 he signed the agreement that would dominate the next nine years of his life.

At first, Johnson believed he could finish the job in three years. A friend reportedly reminded him that the Académie française had needed forty scholars and forty years to complete its dictionary. Johnson's reply has become famous: "Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." The work eventually took three times longer than he predicted, but nine years was still astonishingly fast for a project driven chiefly by one man.

Johnson's Published Blueprint

In 1747, Johnson issued The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, a prospectus addressed to Lord Chesterfield, who had agreed to act as patron. In the Plan, Johnson described an ambitious reference work that would help "fix" English: settling spellings, defining words accurately, and showing proper use through quotations from admired English authors.

That aim reflected a common 18th-century hope. Many believed a dictionary could restrain change and preserve a language in its best form. Johnson began with some sympathy for that view. By the time the dictionary was complete, he had become more practical. In the great Preface to the finished work, he admitted that language changes whether scholars approve or not. The lexicographer, he came to see, records usage more than he commands it.

"Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify."

How the Work Was Compiled

Johnson prepared the dictionary at 17 Gough Square in London. The garret of the house became his workshop. He hired six assistants, five of them Scottish, a fact Boswell later noted with dry amusement. They helped with copying quotations and arranging material, but the central intellectual work—reading, choosing passages, separating meanings, and writing definitions—belonged overwhelmingly to Johnson.

His process was disciplined and, for English lexicography, unusually advanced. Johnson read through a wide range of English literature and marked passages that demonstrated particular words or meanings. Assistants copied those marked passages onto slips of paper and filed them alphabetically. When Johnson drafted an entry, he could examine real examples of the word in use before deciding how to define it.

The quotations came mainly from 16th- and 17th-century authors, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Bacon, and Locke. Johnson regarded that period as a high point of English prose and poetry. He deliberately avoided writing he considered too vulgar or too temporary, which gave the dictionary a strongly literary character rather than the feel of a purely everyday word list.

What Made the Dictionary New

Johnson's Dictionary changed English lexicography through several major features:

Quotations Used as Evidence

Earlier dictionaries sometimes supplied examples, but Johnson made quotations a regular, essential part of the entry. He included about 114,000 quotations from a body of roughly 500 authors. These examples did more than clarify a definition. They showed words at work in serious literature, giving the dictionary a depth and texture that previous English dictionaries had not achieved.

Meanings Carefully Separated

Johnson understood that common words rarely have only one meaning. He separated and numbered different senses with unusual care. His entry for "take," for example, contained 113 distinct senses. That careful treatment of polysemy became a model for later English dictionaries.

Word Origins Included

Johnson supplied etymological information for entries, pointing to sources such as Latin, Greek, French, and other languages. Later scholarship has corrected many of his proposed origins, but the decision to include etymology helped make word history a normal part of dictionary entries.

Usage, Grammar, and Pronunciation Guidance

The dictionary also included an English grammar in its prefatory material and pronunciation help within the entries. Johnson paid attention to parts of speech, irregular forms, and grammatical patterns. That breadth made the book a fuller guide to English than the dictionaries that came before it.

Memorable Definitions and Johnsonian Wit

Johnson is often remembered for definitions that show humor, irritation, or personal bias. Most of his 42,773 entries are serious attempts at accurate explanation, but a small number have become famous because they reveal the author so vividly:

• Dull: "Not exhilarating; not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work."
• Patron: "One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery." (Probably aimed at Lord Chesterfield.)
• Lexicographer: "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words."
• Network: "Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." (Later cited as a classic overcomplicated definition of a simple word.)
• Oats: "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."
• Pension: "An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country." (Johnson would later accept a pension himself.)

These entries still amuse readers, but they are only a small part of the work. Johnson's best definitions are concise, balanced, and impressively exact. Many still show how powerfully a skilled writer can pin down the sense of a word in a few well-chosen phrases.

How Readers Received It

The Dictionary appeared on April 15, 1755, as two large folio volumes. Its importance was recognized almost at once. The Edinburgh Review praised it warmly, and Johnson's public standing changed quickly. He was no longer merely a hard-working writer trying to survive in London; he became a national intellectual figure. Oxford University gave him an honorary Master of Arts degree, and the nickname "Dictionary Johnson" followed him for the rest of his life.

The work went through multiple reprintings. Johnson prepared a revised fourth edition in 1773, adding corrections and improvements. Shorter editions brought the dictionary within reach of more readers. For more than a hundred years, writers, scholars, lawyers, and general readers treated Johnson's Dictionary as the chief authority on English.

Its Effect on Later Dictionary Making

Johnson provided the pattern that later English dictionaries repeatedly returned to. A serious dictionary was now expected to offer broad coverage, definitions divided by sense, quotations, etymology, pronunciation help, and grammatical information. Noah Webster's American Dictionary (1828) responded directly to Johnson, borrowing some practices while rejecting others. The Oxford English Dictionary greatly expanded Johnson's use of dated quotations into a full historical record of English words.

His work also shaped the long debate between telling people how they ought to use language and describing how they actually use it. Johnson's Preface shows a mature awareness that English cannot be frozen by decree. That insight points toward the descriptive principles that later became central to modern lexicography.

The Dictionary also helped stabilize spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Johnson did not single-handedly standardize English orthography, but his book gave readers and printers a respected authority to consult. In that way, it encouraged consistency and helped strengthen many conventions still familiar now.

Why Johnson Still Matters

The house at 17 Gough Square has been preserved as a museum, and visitors can still see the place where Johnson and his assistants produced the dictionary. For lovers of books, dictionaries, and English, it remains a meaningful site. Original copies of the work are prized by collectors and preserved in major libraries around the world.

The Dictionary is also available in digital form, so modern readers can browse Johnson's entries without handling a folio volume. Scholars continue to use it as evidence for 18th-century vocabulary, literary taste, intellectual culture, and the development of English reference works.

Johnson's most enduring achievement is visible whenever we use a modern dictionary. Clear definitions, examples of use, pronunciation guidance, etymology, grammatical labeling—these familiar features all owe something to the model he built more than 270 years ago. He may have called the lexicographer a "harmless drudge," but Johnson proved that lexicography could also be an act of literary intelligence, judgment, and lasting public service.