Samuel Johnson's compilation and publication of A Dictionary of the English Language

Samuel Johnson's compilation and publication of A Dictionary of the English Language transformed a booksellers’ commercial proposal into a landmark work built from sustained reading and carefully selected literary quotations. Published in 1755, the dictionary offered an extensive record of English words and their changing senses; its method and achievement would stand as a point of comparison for later lexicographical projects, even as readers disputed its limits and its author’s visible presence on the page.

Commission and Patronage

The project began in 1746, when five London booksellers, including the Longmans, judged that a new dictionary could find a substantial market. They approached Johnson, a parliamentary writer who was both eager for work and short of money, and offered him fifteen hundred guineas, half in advance. He accepted, asking only that he be allowed to seek the patronage of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, then a prominent arbiter of literary reputation. Chesterfield had impressive public standing and connections, so his support could have lent the proposed dictionary prestige as well as practical advantage.

Chesterfield promised an imprimatur but did not provide the patronage Johnson sought. Beyond a draft for ten pounds, he gave little financial assistance, yet later suggested that he had played a part in the dictionary’s success. That claim became a public source of resentment. Johnson answered not simply with private complaints: in his entry for patron, he defined the role in terms of an indolent supporter who receives flattery in return. The pointed definition carried their quarrel into the work itself. Chesterfield brushed off the attack, but the episode exposed the distance between the powerful patron Johnson had hoped to enlist and the independent author who completed the project.

Reading as a Method

With the booksellers’ advance in hand, Johnson, then thirty-seven, took rooms off Fleet Street and hired six amanuenses. Five were Scotsmen, a detail later noted as a point of connection with James Murray, who came from Hawick. Johnson and his assistants formed a working team of seven, undertaking what would become six years of sustained labour. Rather than treating a dictionary chiefly as a collection of spoken words or a copy of earlier reference works, Johnson made reading the central operation. Existing dictionaries remained useful foundations, but the main task was to search literature, identify words in use, and record evidence for them.

The intended search could not encompass everything, so Johnson imposed a historical boundary. He considered the language to have reached a high point in the writing of William Shakespeare, Bacon, and Spenser, and saw little need to range far earlier than their lifetimes. He used the works of Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, as a practical starting point, and treated the last books of newly dead authors as marking the other end of the search. The resulting survey covered about a century and a half of writing, with occasional material from Chaucer added beyond that main span.

Johnson read the selected books himself, marking and annotating words he wanted to consider. He then had his assistants copy the full sentences containing those words onto slips of paper. These slips preserved context as well as the word: they could later be consulted to illustrate a definition and show a particular use. The process turned reading into an accumulating body of evidence, assembled from individual passages rather than from abstract rules about what English ought to be.

From Evidence to Dictionary

By 1750 Johnson had finished gathering his list of English words. During the following four years he edited the citations, selected 118,000 illustrative quotations, and completed definitions for 43,500 headwords. This distinction between collecting evidence and shaping the finished entries matters: the slips did not automatically become a dictionary. They had to be selected, arranged, interpreted, and made to support a concise account of each word’s meanings.

The quotations allowed entries to register the range and subtlety of ordinary vocabulary. For the verb take, Johnson listed 113 senses in its transitive use and 21 in its intransitive use, supporting the distinctions with examples. Its meanings extended from seizing or catching to winning favour, taking effect, assuming a right, mounting a horse, fleeing, or removing clothing. The dictionary’s scale thus lay not only in the number of words included but in its attention to how a single common word could function in many different ways.

Johnson wrote some definitions himself and drew substantially on writers he admired for others. The entry for elephant, for example, was partly the work of Calmet. The finished work therefore combined Johnson’s editorial judgment with literary evidence and material borrowed from earlier authorities. That mixture contributed to its reach, while also leaving room for disagreement about the reliability of particular sources and the consistency of individual definitions.

Publication and Reception

Johnson delayed publication after completing the definitions because he hoped to obtain a degree from the University of Oxford. He believed the qualification would strengthen the title page, assist the book’s sale, and enhance his own standing. The degree was granted, and on 15 April 1755 the two-volume A Dictionary of the English Language appeared. Its full title announced a work that derived words from their origins, illustrated their different significations through examples from respected writers, and prefaced the dictionary with a history of the language and an English grammar.

The book went through four editions during Johnson’s lifetime and remained the standard English dictionary for the next century. Its commercial success was matched by wide praise, including praise from Chesterfield, whose retrospective claims about his involvement renewed Johnson’s anger. The patron entry preserved the conflict within the dictionary’s own record of language: a word’s definition could also become a vehicle for an author’s judgment of a failed relationship.

The reception was not uniformly favourable. Some readers objected that Johnson’s personality entered the work, making it seem less impersonal than a dictionary meant to possess supreme authority. Critics also questioned the standing of some quoted writers, a limitation Johnson had anticipated in his preface. Other objections concerned definitions that seemed either too slight or too elaborate. The entry for network, for instance, was faulted for describing a structure through a dense formulation of intersecting lines and spaces. A century after publication, Thomas Babington Macaulay condemned Johnson’s work as poor in etymology.

Legacy and Limits

The dictionary’s method made literary reading central to the description of English: words were presented through documented examples, and meanings could be distinguished by comparing their uses. Its achievement was substantial, but it did not make English fixed or settle every dispute about a word’s history. The account of Johnson’s project emphasizes that he came to recognize the impossibility, and undesirability, of permanently fixing a language shaped by custom and use. The dictionary’s authority therefore rested less on stopping linguistic change than on assembling a large, organized record of English as it had been written.

A century later, James Murray likewise treated reading as essential to making a comprehensive dictionary. His New English Dictionary project extended the principle through a much larger organization: Murray called for volunteers to search books, and a later supply of quotation slips could be requested for particular words as the editors needed them. In that system, Johnson’s labour of reading and example-gathering became a historical predecessor to a collaborative enterprise. The contrast is instructive: Johnson’s team of seven made a dictionary through concentrated work in rooms off Fleet Street, while later editors organized readers and evidence across a broad public network. Both approaches made examples from texts the means by which a dictionary could show not merely what words meant, but how English had used them.