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  • Chapter 12 - Samuel Johnson and the ‘First English Dictionary’

  • from Eighteenth-Century English Dictionaries: Prescriptivism and Completeness
  • Edited by Sarah Ogilvie, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries
    Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020, pp 142-154

  • 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. There are few ways in which Johnson’s book can be truly considered a ‘first’, since nearly all his contributions to dictionary-making had precedents in classical and European lexicography. He did, however, introduce some innovations in English lexicography, including grounding his wordlist in the works of English authors, discerning subtle shades of meaning in numbered senses, and providing extensive quotations showing the words in context. Together, these qualities made Johnson’s Dictionary, though not a chronological ‘first’, still the first English dictionary to be widely regarded as the standard of the English language.