Johnson's Dictionary
This was not the
first dictionary but there was dissatisfaction with the earlier ones
so in 1746 a group of London booksellers paid Johnson 1500 guineas
(the equivalent of £300,000 today’s money) to compile a
new one. Johnson thought he would need three years but in the event
it took him nine. He did it all himself with one assistant who copied
out the texts from other sources that established the word.
The book is large! For the first
edition the paper was of the finest quality and cost Johnson more
than he had been paid. It contained 42,773 words and definitions.
[by comparison the 2-volume Oxford shorter English dictionary contains
Half a million words – the 20 volume OED has 59 million words]
Of importance was the fact that Johnson incorporated quotations to
illustrate the meaning of a word (see screen). Physically large it
came with an equally hefty price: £4/10/-. (equivalent to £850
in 2014). So discouraging was the price that by 1784, thirty
years after the first edition was published, when the dictionary had
by then run through five editions, only about 6,000 copies were in
circulation—an average sale of 200 books a year for thirty years. Johnson’s
Dictionary set the standard that was followed by later dictionaries
e.g. Webster’s and the Oxford and in many cases simply using
his definitions.
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