Dr. S. Johnson

In 1621 N.Bailey published his Universal Etymological Dictionary and the English people — shopkeepers, farmers, Iradcsrncn began buying it. It became a best-seller and was reprinted thirty times.

The book earned enormous sums of money, and the publishers decided to write a "real dictionary".They hired Samuel Johnson to write this dictionary. Large, fleshy, untidy, his powdered wig askew on his big head, he was a man of immense learning, self-confidence, and sharp - sometimes savage — wit. He earned a slim income m writing poetry, essays, but he spent most of his days id a tavern talking with friends.

When Lord Chesterfield (a publisher) offered a down payment of 1,575 pounds to write a dictionary, Johnson accepted gladly. He needed the money - he had a wife to support. Tatty [his wife] was 20 years his senior, a fat, easy-going companion whom he loved dearly.

So confident was Johnson of his literary powers that he offered to write a dictionary in 3 years. Friends warned him that this time wasn't time enough. It had taken 40 French scholars 40 years to write a French dictionary. Shouldn't he reconsider?

"Nonsense", Johnson replied in affect, "Any Englishman is the equal of 40 Frenchmen. Three years. That's all it will take!'

One afternoon in 1747, having breakfast at noon, his usual hour for getting out of bed, he huffed up the narrow stairway to the attic of his home at No 17 Gough Square. Sitting himself at a small table and using crude paper and a goose quill pen, he began to work.

A dictionary, he said, should "preserve" the purity of a language, save it from "corruption and decay", and hold back the flood of "low terms" he heard all around him on London streets and in the tavern.

He introduced examples showing how authors used these words. The written word, he believed, was the keystone of a language, the spoken language should sound like sentences in books....

In 1755 Johnson finished his A Dictionary of the English Language (it took him eight years, not three), and he was not satisfied with the work he produced. But he learnt a lot.

1. He realized that relying on his memory for definitions wasn't good enough for dictionary making....

2. He no longer thought it possible to "fix" the language. It was like trying to "lash the wind", he said. Dictionaries were out of date as soon as they were printed.

3. It was people and spoken English, not books that determined how the language developed.

The Dictionary ... was a huge success. Johnson's work was a landmark in the history of dictionary making. It was the first time anyone had put down on paper the words that made up the English language, and it set basic guides for the craft of dictionary making. Lexicographers for the next two centuries would follow the principles Johnson — the intellectual, storyteller, and idler in taverns - had established.

(From "The Story of the Dictionary" by Robert Kraske. N. -Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975P.9-12)

But a real turn away from prescribing to recording dictionaries •- fixing words and their meanings and not giving rigid recommendations about their usage - was made only in the 19^lh and 20^Ul centuries.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries three new concepts emerged in English lexicography:

1. The idea of compiling dictionaries on historical principles.

2. The replacement of prescriptive rules by a relatively systematic descriptive approach.

3. The idea of compiling independent national dictionaries reflecting English language development in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies /Burchficld 1985: 88/.

The idea of compiling dictionaries on historical principles belongs to Dean Richard Trench who in 1857 published his celebrated paper 'On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries'. He put forward the idea of a new dictionary - A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED), that would exhibit each word and each meaning in a historical manner, arranging senses in chronological order, and which contain illustrative quotations from verified printed sources.

Real work on the dictionary began in 1879 when James A.H. Murray, a Scottish schoolmaster and self-taught philologist, was persuaded to become the editor. Later three more editors were added to speed its work, yet the final volume appeared only in 1928 (by that time it was called The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED). The dictionary, nicknamed "the King of Dictionaries", consisted of 12 volumes, 16,569 pages and contained 414,825 defined words. It traced the history of English words over 10 centuries. It included 5,000,000 quotations, and 2,000 readers provided most of them. Sense divisions were precise and detailed. Etymologies were the best available at the time.

It was a 70-year project in which a wide network of volunteers and the editors' families were involved. However, "the wonder is not that it took fifty years to complete, but that it was ever completed at all" /Miller 1991.141/. Other major languages of the world, including Russian, still lack such a dictionary, though many languages, like Swedish, French, German, Hebrew, have recently got a historical dictionary of this kind.

Л supplement appeared in 1933, and four further supplements appeared between 1972 and 1986. In the late seventies a two-volume set in a much-reduced typeface was issued. This edition included a powerful magnifying glass.

The first computerized edition of the OED on CD-ROM has been available since 1988 (Compact Edition of OED). It contains the original 12 volumes, without the Supplement, however. The words that were extinct by 1150 are not included in it, and it does not do justice to the OED.

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