Samuel Johnson Dictionary

8 Key excerpts on "Samuel Johnson Dictionary"

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  A Companion to the History of the English Language

  • Haruko Momma, Michael Matto, Haruko Momma, Michael Matto(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  This section therefore traces within the history of dictionaries – in their myriad forms – the story of the uneasy balance between the creative force of the mass of users and the conservative forces of codification. Michael Matto 9 Dictionaries Today: What Can We Do With Them? Reinhard R. K. Hartmann Introduction The 250th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language ( DEL ) is a convenient occasion (celebrated by McDermott & Moon 2005) to reflect on the nature and value of dictionaries. I want to use it as a starting point for a guided tour to introduce you to some of the most important places and person-alities linked to the subject of English dictionaries, beginning with Samuel Johnson’s and working towards the most important issue of all, whether and how dictionaries are useful today. Setting the Scene Does it make sense to start our tour by looking at the past? Are today’s dictionaries not very different from those in Johnson’s day? It might be worthwhile, at least, to compare the dictionaries of his time with those that we are used to nowadays. What motivated Johnson to compile a dictionary for the English language was his valiant intention to “fix the language.” (In the early eighteenth century English spell-ing and usage were so diverse that many literary figures worried about it, but by 1755 Johnson had to admit defeat on that score.) Tensions remained throughout his project between the conflicting aims of imposing an authoritative standard (“prescriptivism”) and providing an accurate record of a living language (“descriptivism”), but he had to learn all this by trial and error.

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  Inventing English

  A Portable History of the Language

  • Seth Lerer(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  Oxford English Dictionary (published from 1889 to 1928), who, in fact, first called their work the New English Dictionary—for the old one was Johnson’s.

  Just what did Johnson do; what were the sources of his work; how does his lexicography write out not just a history of English or a record of its use but an autobiographical account of its maker? Can there really be an author of a dictionary, or is such work so necessarily collaborative that individual authority is but a ruse? And, finally, how is this Dictionary (or any dictionary, really) not some static object but a work in dialogue with readers and, indeed, itself? For almost as soon as the Dictionary first appeared in 1755, Johnson went to work revising it. New quotations, new definitions, and new orderings took shape, such that by the fourth edition of 1773 a very different kind of book appeared: richer with literary texts but following a more articulated arc of politics, philosophy, and poetic imagination.

  Johnson’s original ideas for a dictionary came out of a constellation of personal ambition and commercial enterprise. Hard-word books proliferated in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to deal with the verbiage of colonial expansion, scientific inquiry, and rhetorical display. Such volumes, for the most part, were but word lists, little concerned with locating their entries either in the history of the language or the speech and writing of their promulgators. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, however, makers of such books perceived a need to order their information systematically. Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of 1728 and Nathan Bailey’s various dictionaries (from the Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1721, through his Dictionarium Britannicum of 1730, to his Dictionary of 1736) set out to find ways of arranging verbal information. Central to both was the location of the word in history. The etymologies of words had long been debated. The old traditions of essentialist, or metaphysical, etymology had sought word meanings in some imagined, precise relationship of sound and sense. There still is some of this tradition in the early dictionaries, but what Bailey in particular did was to use etymology as a way of organizing the hierarchy of a word’s usages or connotations. He defined etymology as “a Part of Grammar, shewing the Original of words, in order to fix their true Meaning and Signification” (quoted in Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 48), and, therefore, the order in which one presents the definitions of a word should follow that original. Take a familiar word like “mother.” The hard-word books offered only the technical or new uses of the term. Henry Cockerham (1623) gives only, “A disease in women when the wombe riseth with paine upwards.” Elisha Coles (1676) begins with “a painful rising of the womb,” while the anonymous Gazophylacium Anglicanum

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  English Historical Semantics

  • Christian Kay, Kathryn Allan(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  The pinnacle of lexicographical authority was, of course, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language , announced in 1747 and pub-lished in 1755. In the Preface to this work, Johnson says that his original intention had been to ‘. . . fix our language, and put a stop to those altera-tions which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition’. However, as he somewhat reluctantly admits, the experience of compiling the dictionary made him realise that no lexi-cographer can ‘embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay’ (Burnley 2000: 305). Nevertheless, Johnson exercised censorship of a kind by basing his work on 114,000 quotations from the canon of English literature, either excluding words which he regarded as unsuit-able or indicating his disapproval, as in coax : ‘To wheedle, to flatter, to humour: a low word’ ( OED coax , verb 3a). Like many others both before and after, he wavered between prescriptivism and descriptivism , the view, which predominates among present-day scholars, that linguists should describe how language is used rather than prescribe a correct version. While debates about the state and future of English were taking place, it continued to become established in overseas territories, often as the language of conquest, displacing native languages rather as French had displaced OE after 1066. Inevitably, these versions of English in different places diverged over time, so that we now regard American English, Australian English, British English, Indian English, and so on, as different varieties of the language traceable to a common ancestor. Following political independence from Britain, many Americans were keen to establish the independence of their English. Notable among them was Noah Webster, who published treatises on many aspects of language, culminating in An American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, which promoted such distinctively American spellings as color ,

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  The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson

  • Greg Clingham(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 4 Johnson and Language Lynda Mugglestone Johnson’s approach to, and treatment of, language has long been a site of fertile debate. His Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755 (a fourth revised edition appeared in 1773), can be seen as marking a newly modern lexicography, characterized by his attentive collection and scrutiny of evidence alongside a detailed engagement with contextual nuance as a way of deriving meaning and sense. 1 Conversely, Johnson is often remembered for his contribution to prescriptive (and proscriptive) linguistics – a domain in which the dictionary-maker’s remit is interventionist and normative, drawing on models established by the Vocabulario of the Accademia della Crusca in 1612 and the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (first edition, 1640). That Johnson “fixed” English spelling is another commonplace assumption in this respect. Johnson’s partisan prejudices present other well-established narratives in which, for example, French or Scottish resistance is seen as imbricated in the Dictionary as text, offering subjective testimony where modern refer- ence works prefer a stance of unwavering impartiality. Johnson’s definition of oats (“A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”) remains a well-rehearsed set-piece. Nevertheless, antecedents in earlier lexicography are plain (“it is forage for Horses in all places; and in some, provision for Men,” wrote Richard Hogarth in his Gazophylacium Anglicanum [1689]). Plain, too, is its assimi- lation into eighteenth-century lexicography more widely. “In most parts of England, and in others, as also in Scotland, the chief support of the people,” wrote Nicol Scott in his New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1755).

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  Words and Their Meaning

  • Howard Jackson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Webster's Third contain etymologies, but they do not give sense-histories. The record has now become the record of the contemporary language: the state of the current vocabulary, or at least the cross-section that a particular dictionary is big enough to cope with. Modern dictionaries thus have a double function: they represent on the one hand a piece of linguistic description, an account of the landscape of English words; on the other hand they are purveyed as manuals for users of the language to refer to particularly when they need help in understanding what they read.

  These two functions are, however, complexly interwoven with a third. Johnson saw his dictionary as setting a standard for linguistic usage; the standard would derive from the practice of the ‘best writers’, whom he had excerpted for illustrative quotations. Future lexicographers may deny that they see their dictionaries as setting the same authoritative standard that Johnson intended his to be: for the dictionary-buying public, ‘the dictionary’ is not just a reference manual or a record of the vocabulary; it provides an authority on how the language should be used, and they have recourse to it as an arbiter in disputes about linguistic usage. The dictionary has an imputed function as the auth-ority on the language.

  Exercises

  1. Read Johnson's The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language and/or his Preface to the Dictionary. (The Plan is reprinted in M. Wilson (ed.), 1957. The Preface is also reprinted there and is found in most anthologies of Johnson's prose.) What different aspects of the description of a word (e.g. spelling, pronunciation) would he deal with in his lexicographical description? If you have access to a copy of Johnson's Dictionary

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  Samuel Johnson

  The Critical Heritage

  • James T. Boulton(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  DICTIONARY 15 April 1755

  13. Johnson’s Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language

  August 1747

  Johnson’s aspirations as expressed in 1747 were not all to be realized in the finished Dictionary; but the Plan remains a significant critical document as his first extensive statement on lexicography. It was published in the form of a letter to Lord Chesterfield.

  In the first attempt to methodise my ideas, I found a difficulty which extended itself to the whole work. It was not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen. The chief intent of it is to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom; and this seems to require nothing more than that our language be considered so far as it is our own; that the words and phrases used in the general intercourse of life, or found in the works of those whom we commonly stile polite writers, be selected, without including the terms of particular professions, since, with the arts to which they relate, they are generally derived from other nations, and are very often the same in all the languages of this part of the world. This is perhaps the exact and pure idea of a grammatical dictionary; but in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use: It is not enough that a dictionary delights the critic, unless at the same time it instructs the learner; as it is to little purpose, that an engine amuses the philosopher by the subtilty of its mechanism, if it requires so much knowledge in its application, as to be of no advantage to the common workman.

  [discusses lexicographical problems, including spelling, pronunciation, and etymology.]

  Thus, my Lord, will our language be laid down, distinct in its minutest subdivisions, and resolved into its elemental principles. And who upon this survey can forbear to wish, that these fundamental atoms of our speech might obtain the firmness and immutability of the primogenial and constituent particles of matter, that they might retain their substance while they alter their appearance, and be varied and compounded, yet not destroyed.

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  English in Modern Times

  • Joan C Beal(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although in size, at least, it has since been superseded by the OED, The Century Dictionary, like Webster’s dictionaries, is also important, because, as Triggs points out, ‘its American orientation (excellent American pronunciations, preference given to American spelling forms, attention to words of American origin) gives it a special relevance in our time. It is still an American treasure.’ Whilst clearly influenced by European scholarship, The Century Dictionary stands as a monument to American scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century, and, in turn, its contribution to the OED foreshadows the emergence of American English as the most influential variety of English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 3.4 The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles/Oxford English Dictionary We have seen in the previous section that, both in Britain and the USA, English lexicography was far from dormant in the nineteenth century, with Webster, Richardson and Whitney all producing innovative dictionaries. However, at least in Britain, Johnson was to remain the household name for most of the century. R.G. Latham, Professor of English at University College, London, produced a revised edition of Johnson’s dictionary for Longman as late as 1866, and put his own name to A Dictionary of the English Language ‘founded on that of Dr Samuel Johnson, as edited by the Rev. H. J. Todd, M.A.’ in 1882 and J. M. Dent and Sons published a revised version of the pocket edition in London as late as 1891. Whilst Todd’s edition had ‘numerous emendations and additions’, as well as a preface by Latham in addition to Johnson’s, it is notable that Longman still saw Johnson’s name as an important selling-point as late as the end of the nineteenth century

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  A Sociolinguistic History of British English Lexicography

  • Heming Yong, Jing Peng(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A New, Practical and Exhaustive Work of Reference to all the Words in the English Language, with a Full Account of their Origin, Meaning, Pronunciation, History and Use (1879–1888) by Robert Hunter (1823–1897). Second, among bilingual dictionaries, fewer English-Latin dictionaries were compiled, while bilingual dictionaries of English and modern European languages mushroomed, such as combinations of French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and so on. Obviously, the countries that had those languages were strong powers in Europe. Third, a great deal of serious attention was paid to dialectal studies and dialect dictionaries, and quite a few high-quality dialect dictionaries appeared, covering all the major dialects spoken in important regions of Europe, and became an attractive highlight in the 19th-century English lexicography. Fourth, a succession of slang dictionaries, quotation dictionaries and etymological dictionaries were published, with slang dictionaries being the most influential upon later generations of compilers. Finally, there occurred for the first time in the history of British English lexicography a dictionary of synonyms, which nevertheless turned out to be well developed in both structure and contents, leaving behind it valuable experiences in the making of this type of dictionaries and setting up a role model for later compilations.

  Let us discuss Charles Richardson’s (1775–1865) English monolingual dictionary first. For nearly a century after the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, no strong rivals appeared until Richardson’s A New Dictionary of the English Language was published by William Pickering in parts between 1835 and 1837. Richardson, a philologist and lexicographer, started a legal career in his early life but abandoned it for scholarly and literary pursuits and then took up an English teaching post. His Illustrations to English Philology (1815) contained a critical examination of Johnson’s dictionary demonstrating his extensive, profound and yet hostile insights about his dictionary as well as dictionary-making. It was reissued in 1826.

  In the preface to his dictionary, Richardson stated in a more-or-less complacent way that no one could compile a genuinely English dictionary unless he chose a course different from the steps Johnson had set. Three years later, the opening portions of his lexicon appeared in the alphabetical order in volumes 14 to 25 of Encyclopædia Metropolitana (1818–1845). In 1834, he issued the prospectus of a new English dictionary, and the result was a revised, augmented and heavily etymologically oriented republication of his lexicon, entitled A New English Dictionary

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