Two folio volumes, enormous, priced at four pounds ten shillings — far beyond the reach of an ordinary household, but treasured in the libraries of institutions and grand houses. A Dictionary of the English Language appeared on 15 April 1755, in a first run of two thousand copies. It was the work of one man, and for more than 150 years — until the Oxford English Dictionary, issued in parts from 1884 and finished only in 1928, displaced it — to settle a question of English you reached for it.
The French had needed forty men. The Académie Française, founded in 1635, set its forty academicians to the task of fixing their language in a single authoritative dictionary, and the work crawled: begun in 1639, the first edition did not appear until 1694. When a group of London booksellers wanted the same thing for English, they hired Samuel Johnson and gave him three years. A friend objected that the French Academy, forty members strong, had taken forty years over theirs. Johnson did the arithmetic. Forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three is to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.
He missed his deadline by six.
The Commission
On 18 June 1746, a consortium of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write the dictionary for 1,500 guineas. He was thirty-six, poor, and largely unknown. The following year he published a Plan of a Dictionary, addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield, laying out how the thing would be done.
What it would be done with was reading — an enormous amount of it. Johnson worked through more than five hundred books: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, the Bible, works of law and science and divinity. As he read he underlined the words he wanted and marked the passages that showed each word in use. The plan was to define the language not by assertion but by showing how its finest writers had actually used it.
The Making
The work was assembled in the garret of his house at 17 Gough Square. There a small team of clerks called amanuenses copied Johnson’s marked passages onto slips of paper, one word to a slip. Over the nine years there were six of them, five Scots and one Englishman, with never more than four working at once.
The slips piled up by the tens of thousands. Johnson took each headword, sorted its quotations, and wrote the definitions himself.
The finished work ran to 42,773 entries, supported by roughly 114,000 illustrative quotations drawn from the best of English writing — the first English dictionary built that way.
The Voice Inside It
A dictionary is supposed to be impersonal. This one was not. Johnson defined the job in the book itself: a lexicographer, he wrote, is “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”
The drudge had opinions, and he let them show. Oats he defined as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people” — a jab at the Scots, several of whom were copying his slips upstairs. A pension was “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.” For network he reached for the absurd: “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” These flickers of wit and prejudice are what kept the book human, and what people quote from it still.
He also got things wrong, and owned it. A woman once asked him how he came to define pastern as the knee of a horse, when it is the part of the leg just above the hoof. Johnson did not reach for a learned excuse. “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance,” he said.
The Name That Almost Went on the Spine
Chesterfield, the noble patron of the Plan, sent ten pounds and then nothing at all for the seven years that followed — a sum so inconsiderable, Johnson said afterwards, that it was not worth the mention. In late 1754, with the Dictionary nearly finished and certain to succeed, he wrote two essays in The World praising it and recommending it to the public — angling, Johnson believed, to have the great work dedicated to him.
Johnson’s reply, on 7 February 1755, became one of the most celebrated letters in English literature — often called the declaration of independence of the modern author. He had pushed the work to the verge of publication, he wrote, “without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour.” Then the line that finished the patronage system: “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?” The favour had come, he said, too late: “till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.”
What It Became
It was not the first English dictionary, and it was not flawless. But it was the first that tried to capture the whole working language with authority and grace, and it did so well enough that it held the field for a century and a half.
There is one last turn. In 1762, George III granted Johnson a pension of £300 a year for life. The man had to be reassured it was for what he had already written, not a bribe for future loyalty — because anyone could open his own Dictionary and read what its author thought a pension was.