Tribute to Dr. Johnson
We didn't realize it, but 2005 is the quatrimillennial (quarter millennium) of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.
His wasn't the first dictionary, though. The first was Robert Cawdray's A Table Alphabeticall, compiled, as he described it, for "ladies ... or any other unskilfull persons." Efforts like Cawdray's addressed only difficult words.
Johnson, on the contrary, intended to include all words, not just the difficult. "In addition," says Richard Lederer in a pleasant Vocabula Review essay this month, "he would show how to divide words into syllables and where words came from. He would establish a consistent system of defining words and draw from his own gigantic learning to provide, for the first time in any dictionary, illustrative quotations from famous writers. Johnson's lexicon, like its modern descendents, is a report on the way writers actually used the English language."
Lederer continues:
When a friend of his pointed out that it had taken forty French scholars forty years to accomplish what he proposed to do in three, Johnson replied, "Let me see: forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three is to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman."
And what an Englishman! Johnson, underfunded and working almost alone in a Fleet Street garret room, defined some 43,000 words and illuminated their meanings with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of literature. The task took nearer nine than three years, but the results more than justified Johnson's ambitious hopes.
* * *
England and America are dictionary nations. According to recent polls, 90 percent of all households in the two countries possess at least one dictionary, a higher percentage than those that own Bibles or cookbooks. That so many English speakers are not only literate but "dictionarate" is part of the inheritance handed down 250 years ago by the loving labor of a half-blind but far-sighted scholar.
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