A Dictionary of the English Language

• 1. Introduction

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  A Dictionary of the English Language arrived in print on the 15th of April 1755, and it changed what a dictionary could be. Samuel Johnson, working largely alone at 17 Gough Square in London, had spent seven years producing something that no team of scholars in England had yet managed: a comprehensive record of the English tongue, defined with care, illustrated with literature, and laced with the author's own opinions on everything from oats to excise taxes.

  The book was enormous in every sense. Its pages stood 18 inches tall and nearly 20 inches wide. The paper alone cost nearly £1,600 to produce, which was more than Johnson had been paid to write it. Johnson himself called it "Vasta mole superbus" - proud in its great bulk. The first edition listed 42,773 words, supported by around 114,000 literary quotations drawn from Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and dozens of others.

  For the next 173 years, until the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Johnson's was regarded as the pre-eminent English dictionary. Scholar Walter Jackson Bate would later write that it "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time." How Johnson got there, who tried to help him and failed, and what the book actually did to the English-speaking world - those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Before Johnson

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  The oldest English-adjacent dictionary in the tradition Johnson inherited was a Latin-English wordbook by Sir Thomas Elyot, published in 1538. By the time Johnson sat down to work in 1746, more than twenty dictionaries had appeared in England over the previous 150 years, yet none had done the job properly.

  Richard Mulcaster, a headmaster, had compiled a list of eight thousand words in 1583, noting wistfully that it would be praiseworthy if someone well-learned would gather all English words into a single dictionary. Fifteen years later, in 1598, John Florio published an Italian-English dictionary that introduced the practice of using quotations to give meaning to words. Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of 1604 became the first monolingual English dictionary, though it contained only 2,449 words and omitted every word beginning with W, X, or Y.

  By 1721, Nathan Bailey had assembled a dictionary of 40,000 words. Yet even Bailey's effort shared the central weakness of everything that came before it: these were glossaries of "hard words," a catch-all for technical, foreign, obscure, or antiquated terms. As historian Henry Hitchings put it, early lexicographers "failed to give sufficient sense of the English language as it appeared in use." Benjamin Martin's Lingua Britannica Reformata in 1749 and Ainsworth's Thesaurus from 1737 began defining entries in separate senses, which pointed in the right direction - but it would take Johnson to bring all of these strands together into something a reader could actually live with.

• 3. The Commission and the Patron

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  In June 1746, a consortium of London's most successful printers gathered to address a problem they could not ignore. The rise of literacy among the general public, combined with advances in printing and bookbinding, had put books, pamphlets, and newspapers into the hands of ordinary readers at reasonable cost. That explosion of the printed word demanded a standard for grammar, definition, and spelling. No single bookseller could afford to take on such a project alone, so a group that included Robert Dodsley and Thomas Longman pooled resources and contracted Samuel Johnson to write the dictionary for 1,500 guineas, equivalent to £1,575.

  Johnson had told them he could finish in three years. He was wrong by four. By 1747 he had written his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, laying out his intentions and methodology. He compared his role to legal precedent: "I shall therefore, since the rules of stile, like those of law, arise from precedents often repeated, collect the testimonies of both sides, and endeavour to discover and promulgate the decrees of custom, who has so long possessed whether by right or by usurpation, the sovereignty of words."

  Johnson's Plan attracted the patronage of Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield - or so it seemed. Seven years passed. Chesterfield did nothing of substance to support the work. Then, just as the Dictionary neared publication, he wrote two anonymous essays in The World endorsing Johnson and calling for a dictator of the English language, nominating Johnson for the role. Johnson was unmoved. In a letter that has become one of the most celebrated put-downs in English literary history, he told Chesterfield that he had spent those years "pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain" without "one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour." He defined a patron, pointedly, as one "who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help."

• 4. Inside the Dictionary

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  Printing the Dictionary required a quality of paper so fine that the bill for it - nearly £1,600 - exceeded what Johnson had been paid to write the book. The text ran double-columned in 3.5 mm type; the preface and headings used a slightly larger 4.6 mm type. The word "Samuel Johnson" and "English Language" on the title page were printed in red; the rest was in black.

  What distinguished Johnson's entries from everything that came before was the combination of literary quotation, multiple senses, and the author's own voice. The word "Take" received 134 definitions, running 8,000 words across 5 pages. "Put" spread over 3 pages and more than 5,000 words. These were not obscure or technical words: they were the ordinary hinges of the language, and Johnson was the first to show how complicated ordinary words actually are.

  The quotations came from Johnson's own reading. He had marked passages in books, and clerical assistants copied them out - that was essentially the only help he had. He cited Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden most frequently, but also Jonathan Swift, whose verses illustrated the word "opulence" in the first edition.

  Then there were the definitions that reveal Johnson as a man with opinions. He defined "Excise" as "a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid." He defined "Oats" as "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." He defined "Lexicographer" as "a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words." His entry for "Patron" - "One who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery" - was widely read as a parting shot at Chesterfield.

• 5. Faults and Gaps

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  Johnson admitted at least one error directly. Boswell records that a lady once asked him how he came to define "pastern" as the knee of a horse. Rather than offering an elaborate defence, Johnson replied simply: "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance."

  His etymologies were largely guesswork, which was unavoidable given the state of linguistic scholarship at the time. His classical leanings led him to prefer spellings that appeared to trace back to Latin or Greek, even when those derivations were wrong. He preferred the spelling "ache" over "ake" because he incorrectly believed it derived from the Greek word achos. His inconsistencies on spelling were also notable: he retained the Latin "p" in "receipt" but dropped it from "deceit"; he spelled "uphill" one way and "downhil" another, "instill" one way and "distil" another.

  His guidance on pronunciation was thin. He wrote that the best general rule was to consider those who deviated least from the written sounds as the most elegant speakers. John Walker, who wrote a Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, took issue with this directly, arguing that where custom had not decided the matter Johnson's rule was reasonable, but that in many cases custom had already decided - and Johnson had simply not followed it. Walker nonetheless followed Johnson's explanations of word meanings closely, as did many other lexicographers of the period.

  The Dictionary also reflected a prescriptivist instinct. Johnson favoured traditional spellings such as "publick" over simpler alternatives that Noah Webster would advocate 73 years later. And because the book followed the eighteenth-century English alphabet, which treated I and J as variants of the same letter, and did the same with U and V, the word "jargon" appears before "idle" and "vagabond" before "ultimate" - an arrangement that today reads as a puzzle.

• 6. Reception and Reward

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  The London Magazine and the Gentleman's Magazine both wrote the Dictionary up enthusiastically after publication, the latter giving it an eight-page notice. The loudest critical voice came from Adam Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review, who felt Johnson should more often have flagged words not in approved use and that his approach was not sufficiently grammatical. That was a measured objection. Other detractors were less temperate.

  John Horne Tooke called it "one of the most idle performances ever offered to the public" and complained that nearly a third of its contents were as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English. Horace Walpole, at the end of the century, declared he could not imagine Johnson's reputation lasting and suggested that a society, not a single man, should have taken on the task. Meanwhile Johnson's financial situation remained precarious for years after 1755. He gave up the house at Gough Square in March 1759, probably for want of money. The image of him writing Rasselas rapidly to pay for his mother's funeral - Boswell calls it romantic hyperbole - captures the instability that persisted almost four years after he had finished the Dictionary.

  The turn came in July 1762, when George III, then twenty-four years old, granted Johnson a state pension of £300 a year. It did not make him wealthy, but it ended the scramble for odd guineas. By 1784, thirty years after the first edition, the Dictionary had passed through five editions. Even so, only about 6,000 copies were in circulation, an average of 200 books a year - a modest spread for a work of such standing. The abridged edition of 1756, published in two octavo volumes without the full literary quotations, sold over a thousand copies a year for the next thirty years and brought the Dictionary within reach of ordinary literate households.

• 7. An Expanding Footprint

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  James Murray, one of the first editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, acknowledged that many of Johnson's explanations had been adopted without change, writing that "when his definitions are correct, and his arrangement judicious, it seems to be expedient to follow him." In the end the OED reproduced around 1,700 of Johnson's definitions, marking them simply with the letter J. Simon Winchester, in his history of the OED, wrote that by the end of the eighteenth century every educated household had or had access to Johnson, and that any request for "The Dictionary" would bring it forth and none other.

  Abroad, the Dictionary's influence was equally direct. The president of the Florentine Accademia declared it a "perpetual Monument of Fame" and a "general Benefit to the Republic of Letters." Johnson's friend Giuseppe Baretti used it as the model for his Italian-English dictionary of 1760, and for his Spanish dictionary published nearly two decades later. Ferdinando Bottarelli, compiling a pocket dictionary of Italian, French, and English in 1777, used the French and Italian academies as his authorities for those languages - but for English he used Johnson.

  In America the story took a sharper edge. Noah Webster declared in 1789 that Britain's language was in decline and that America should no longer regard it as a standard. Yet even Webster could not ignore Johnson's framework. His rival Joseph Worcester, who completed his Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language in 1846, took the opposite position and defended Johnson as the standard for the language from the time of its publication. The Dictionary has also carried legal weight in the United States: as long as questions of what words meant to their original architects remain relevant to interpreting legislation, Johnson's work of 1755 retains a function in American courts.

  In 2005, the Royal Mint marked the 250th anniversary of the Dictionary's publication with a commemorative fifty pence coin - a concrete measure of how far the book had travelled from that overcrowded workroom at 17 Gough Square.