Johnson tried to cover as much of the actual English vocabulary as he could, while not neglecting those who needed help with the obscure words that appeared in literature. Johnson included only a few words like these, always hesitantly, and indicated clearly whenever he had no evidence for a word beside other dictionaries. Bailey also included many words that have never been spotted “in the wild,” that is, used by real English-speakers: many of them were little more than Greek or Latin words with English suffixes tacked onto them. Johnson omitted most of this encyclopedic material. Bailey gave space to entries that were more encyclopedic than lexicographical: Druid gets a mini-essay of several hundred words, the legendary Cretan king Minos and the Minotaur take up half a column, and there are long discussions of ancient Roman customs and the difference between Nazarenes and Nazarites. ( One count gives the satisfyingly but misleadingly precise 41,684 entries.) This is less than Bailey’s 48,000, but Johnson did a better job covering the common vocabulary. Johnson’s Dictionary includes roughly 42,000 entries-“roughly” in part because it’s not always clear whether we should count something as one long entry or several short ones. The latter ran to more than 800 pages and contained around 48,000 words, a far cry from the 2,500 words in Cawdrey. Johnson’s most important English predecessor, Nathan Bailey, published two dictionaries: the first, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, appeared in 1721, and the second, Dictionarium Britannicum, followed nine years later. Over time, though, dictionaries treated more and more familiar words. They might cover categorematical and catachresis but skip over cat dodecahedron, and dogmatize yes, dog no. The earliest dictionaries focused mostly on “hard words,” and made no pretense of covering the whole vocabulary. ![]() ![]() Over the next hundred and fifty years the lexicographers’ ambitions grew, and their dictionaries grew with them. Indiana State University Multimedia ServicesĬawdrey marked a modest beginning for English lexicography. Impertinent, not pertaining to the matter Cawdrey’s definitions are brief, sometimes just a single word, and not always very accurate: It focuses especially on uncommon words from Latin and Greek: it contains pacifie, pactation, palatine, and palinodie, but skips over more familiar words like pace, pack, pad, paddle, page, pain, and paint. The first one, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall: Conteyning and Teaching the True Writing, and Understanding of Hard Usuall English Wordes, appeared in 1604, a small book of 130 unnumbered pages and around 2,500 entries. General-purpose monolingual English dictionaries arrived on the scene late. The first English dictionaries were bilingual-Latin–English, for instance-or specialized, covering the legal vocabulary, say, or terms related to gardening. To understand what makes it important, we need to put it in the context of earlier English dictionaries. Not only was it not the first English dictionary, but Johnson made very few innovations in lexicography-very little about it is truly new. In fact it’s a serious scholarly survey of the entire English vocabulary. Some of the witty and satirical definitions and obscure words have become so famous that some people think the whole book is a collection of witticisms, like Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, but those entries make up only a tiny fraction of the book. It’s famous as “the first dictionary,” but there had been dozens of English dictionaries before Johnson’s. ![]() Much of what we think we know about Johnson’s Dictionary is wrong.
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