by Jack Lynch
With this second edition, the Dictionnaire began to overcome its inauspicious beginnings. The new edition brought with it some changes in policy, most notably that it followed straightforward alphabetical order, making the work accessible to a broader audience. From that time to this, the Académie’s dictionaries have gone from strength to strength. A Nouveau dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise appeared in 1718, a third edition in 1740, and a fourth in 1762. The international prestige of French culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned the Dictionnaire into a model for dictionaries around the world, and the Académie’s work was established by law as the official standard of the French language—a status never accorded to any dictionary in the English-speaking world. The eighth edition (1932–35) is the most recent complete Dictionnaire, and the Académie has been working since 1986 on a ninth edition.
How different were events two hundred miles away from the Académie’s Paris headquarters. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, prepared by an academy with official government sanction, was all about authority and propriety. But there was no Académie Anglaise, no Académie Britannique. Britain lagged behind the other European nations in establishing official regulatory bodies to assume control over the language.
Mythology has treated Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, as “the first English dictionary”—but the mythology is as wrong as can be. There had been English dictionaries generations before Johnson’s. The Promptorium parvulorum, sive clericorum (Storehouse for Children or Clerics), probably by Galfridus Grammaticus (Geoffrey the Grammarian), was written around 1440 and published in 1499; it was the first extended attempt to give Latin equivalents for an English vocabulary of about twelve thousand entries. English–Latin dictionaries on the same plan continued to appear, including the anonymous Catholicon Anglicum in 1483, Richard Huloet’s Abcedarium Anglo-Latinum in 1552, John Withals’s Shorte Dictionarie in 1553, John Baret’s Alvearie in 1573, and John Rider’s Bibliotheca Scholastica in 1589. There were also dictionaries going the other way. Sir Thomas Elyot wrote the first English book with “dictionary” in its title, The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght, a Latin–English dictionary, in 1538, and Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae followed in 1565.11
These early dictionaries were bilingual; the first English–English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, appeared in 1604. On its own merits it was mediocre at best. The definitions were skimpy, and it covered just twenty-five hundred “difficult” words:
modell, measure,
moderate, temperate, or keeping a meane,
moderation, keeping due order and proportion:
§ moderne, of our time
modest, sober, demure
§ moitie, halfe.
molestation, troubling.
Once Cawdrey broke the ice, though, English dictionaries began to appear regularly, and they grew over time. Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words, appeared in London in 1623. He had two separate alphabetical sequences. The first part contains “the choisest words themselues now in vse, wherewith our language is inriched and become so copious.” Next to each of these hard words “the common sense is annexed”—a translation into plain English. Cockeram informed the curious that soporate, for example, means “To bring asleepe.” The second half went in the opposite direction, translating “common sense” into “choicest words.” Someone who needed to speak about dung but blushed at using such a low word could turn to Cockeram and try out ordure; someone who feared drawing near was too common might find appropinquation the better choice. Mighty was good, but armipotent was better. And rip, rowe, and rub out were upgraded by Cockeram to dilorigate, remigate, and deterge.
TITLE: A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers: To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar
COMPILER: Samuel Johnson (1709–84)
ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, a to zootomy
PUBLISHED: London: printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755
VOLUMES: 2
PAGES: 2,300
ENTRIES: 42,773
TOTAL WORDS: 3.5 million
SIZE: 15½″ × 9½″ (39.4 × 24 cm)
AREA: 2,330 ft2 (217 m2)
WEIGHT: 12 lb. (5.6 kg)
PRICE: £4 10s.
These English dictionaries, though, lacked the authority of a national academy. English writers therefore started calling for an English academy.12 A member of London’s Royal Society, John Evelyn, encouraged that group to get to work on “a Lexicon or collection of all the pure English words.” Jonathan Swift made waves with A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, and Daniel Defoe called for an academy in his Essay upon Projects (1697). Between 1660 and 1730, in fact, England was riddled with proposals for an academy—but one after another they fizzled. And perhaps for this reason the great heap of dictionaries that had appeared between 1604 and 1749—twenty of them—did not seem authoritative to many people. John Dryden, writing in 1693, was direct: “we have yet no English Prosodia, not so much as a tolerable Dictionary.” David Hume agreed in 1741: “The Elegance and Propriety of Stile have been very much neglected among us. We have no Dictionary of our Language, and scarce a tolerable Grammar.” And in 1747, William Warburton noted that “the English tongue, at this Juncture, deserves and demands our particular regard.” He lamented that “we have neither GRAMMAR nor DICTIONARY, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through this wide sea of Words.”13 Despite a considerable library of English dictionaries, the world still seemed convinced that none merited the name.
The answer came not from an academy, but from a group of publishers who set a lone scholar to work on the task. We do not know why a consortium of booksellers approached Samuel Johnson in 1746 with the idea of his writing a dictionary. He was an unlikely choice. Johnson came from the provinces, in Lichfield, not from London. He was prodigiously learned, but no academic—he spent just over a year at Oxford before a shortage of funds forced him to withdraw without even an undergraduate degree. He became a schoolmaster for a brief while, but no one could call him a success.
In 1737 he left the provinces to find fame in London as a scholar and playwright. He hoped his verse tragedy, Irene, though not quite ready, would be a hit when it appeared, and he planned to publish editions of neo-Latin poets. But the market for verse tragedy and neo-Latin poets was only slightly better in 1737 than it is today, and his dreams came to nothing. Miscellaneous journalism, with skimpy payments by the printed sheet, was all that was open to him. Johnson stuck at it for years, and he built a reputation as a decent scholar, but only among a knowing few. To top it off, he was a gawky bundle of nervous tics who twitched and spat as he talked (most likely he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome).
And yet, if the choice of Johnson was unlikely, it was also inspired. His memory was prodigious, and few could match his reading. He promised to deliver a complete dictionary to rival the French Dictionnaire in just three years. Disbelievers scoffed: forty scholars had needed forty years to produce the Dictionnaire. Johnson was ready with a gloriously brassy riposte: “This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”14
He did, in fact, miss his deadline. From contract to publication took not three years but nine—still an impressive proportion next to the sixteen hundred man-years the French had taken. Johnson lived at that time on Gough Square in London (the only one of his London houses that still stands), and he worked nearly alone in his attic. He read through hundreds of books for his source material; when he saw a passage that illustrated a word, he underscored the appropriate word, wrote its initial lett
er in the margin, and drew vertical lines at the beginning and end of the relevant passage. A half dozen amanuenses took the books he marked and copied passages out by hand onto slips of paper, but he otherwise worked solo. These slips would become the raw material for his Dictionary, both the source of his quotations and the material that guided his definitions.
When the Dictionary finally appeared, several features made it a milestone. One has to do with the meanings. Although numbered senses had been used inconsistently in a few prior English dictionaries, Johnson took them further than anyone had before, and he was a master of distinguishing subtle shades of meaning:
PRIDE n. s. [prit or pryd, Saxon.]
1. Inordinate and unreasonable self-esteem.
I can see his pride
Peep through each part of him.
Shakesp. Henry VIII.
Pride hath no other glass
To shew itself, but pride; for supple knees
Feed arrogance, and are the proud man’s fees.
Shakesp.
He his wonted pride soon recollects.
Milton.
Vain aims, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits engend’ring pride.
Milton.
2. Insolence; rude treatment of others; insolent exultation.
That witch
Hath wrought this hellish mischief unawares;
That hardly we escap’d the pride of France.
Shakesp.
They undergo
This annual humbling certain number’d days,
To dash their pride and joy for man seduc’d.
Milton.
Wantonness and pride
Raise out of friendship, hostile deeds in peace.
Milton.
3. Dignity of manner; loftiness of air.
4. Generous elation of heart.
The honest pride of conscious virtue.
Smith.
5. Elevation; dignity.
A falcon, tow’ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawkt at and kill’d.
Shakesp.
6. Ornament; show; decoration.
Whose lofty trees, yclad with summer’s pride,
Did spread so broad, that heavens light did hide.
F. Qu.
He provided etymologies for every word, something the Vocabolario and Dictionnaire neglected, though he got many wrong, and sometimes confessed ignorance: tatterdemalion is from “tatter and I know not what.” At least as important, he backed up these definitions with quotations—somewhere in the neighborhood of 115,000 of them, drawn from English literature between the 1580s and his own time, with particular attention to Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, John Locke, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and the King James Bible. Quotations like these could be found in classical lexicons and the Italian Vocabolario, but no English dictionary maker had ever used them half as systematically as Johnson.
This may be the most significant difference between Johnson and les Immortels. The French Dictionnaire provided examples of words in use, but they were all made up by the Academicians: they knew what the best usage was, even when it differed from what real writers had used. For Johnson, by contrast, the canon of great authors was his starting point, and this corpus-based approach was central to his conception of what makes a word a word: real words had to be found in actual literature. On the very few occasions when he included a word he had not found “in the wild,” as it were, he did it with reservation, clearly indicating that these words were provisional candidates by citing as an authority just “Dict.,” for “Dictionary”:
Many words yet stand supported only by … Dict. … of these I am not always certain that they are seen in any book but the works of lexicographers. Of such I have omitted many, because I had never read them; and many I have inserted, because they may perhaps exist, though they have escaped my notice: they are, however, to be yet considered as resting only upon the credit of former dictionaries.15
The story of the composition of Johnson’s Dictionary is one of progressive disillusionment. The initial proposal was revised into publishable form and became The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, issued in 1747. There Johnson expressed his intention to clean up the language—the same sort of thing would-be academicians had been calling for since the 1660s, and the sort of thing the Académie Française had done in the 1690s. He even viewed his task in quasimilitary terms. “When I survey the Plan,” he wrote,
I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Cæsar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.
The metaphors are suggestive. Johnson saw himself as a Roman legionnaire preparing to invade an unruly Britain and impose imperial order and regularity on it—to take the Germanic barbarians and civilize them with Latinate elegance and propriety. The language was a rebellious population: he would “civilize part of the inhabitants” and encourage someone else to “reduce them wholly to subjection.” This is strange language coming from Johnson, who later in life became one of his age’s most vocal opponents of colonial expansion.
Before long, though, he realized his intentions were misplaced. No one can hope to “civilize” a living language; it is pure foolishness to impose rules on it. He wrote of the way the academicians wanted to stop the language from changing: “With this hope … academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders.” His opinion of their success is telling: “their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride.”16
This became much clearer as the Dictionary was approaching completion. Johnson had asked Philip Dormer Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to serve as his patron, but the distinguished nobleman brushed him off. Once the book was ready to appear, though, rumor said it was going to be a blockbuster, and Chesterfield decided he wanted credit for supporting it. He therefore published a review before the fact, right before the Dictionary came out, insisting that “The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary.” He attributed this sad state of affairs specifically to the lack of an authoritative dictionary: “I had long lamented that we had no lawful standard of our language set up, for those to repair to, who might chuse to speak and write it grammatically and correctly.” Johnson had provided the solution, and Chesterfield demanded that the world acknowledge his authority. “I will not only obey him,” Chesterfield vowed, “like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair.”17 But Johnson, who might once have been flattered at the thought of being an emperor, almost certainly found the metaphor from the papacy too much to handle. He saw through Chesterfield’s ploy and wrote one of the nastiest letters in the English language, telling his lordship that his assistance was not wanted. Part of the vitriol came from the shoddy treatment Johnson felt he had received: Chesterfield had refused to be bothered when Johnson needed the help. But part of it also came from Johnson’s recent thinking about the state of the language. Only a fool would, he concluded, “imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay,” and yet “With this hope … academies have been instituted.” Johnson realized that no academy can chan
ge the fact of language evolution, and even if it could, it should not. Language, he realized, develops on its own, and a lexicographer must “not form, but register the language.”18
The Dictionary appeared in two folio volumes on April 15, 1755, not merely the largest English dictionary yet published, but as long as the first seven monolingual English dictionaries put together. Early reviews were strong, and the actor David Garrick wrote a poem celebrating his friend’s superiority to the French academicians and their dictionary, turning the Dictionary’s publication into an event of national moment:
Talk of war with a Briton, he’ll boldly advance,
That one English soldier will beat ten of France;
Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen,
Our odds are still greater, still greater our men …
First Shakespeare and Milton, like Gods in the fight,
Have put their whole drama and epic to flight;
In satires, epistles, and odes, would they cope,
Their numbers retreat before Dryden and Pope;
And Johnson, well-arm’d like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more.
Sales of the expensive volumes were slow at first, but low-cost abridged editions put Johnson’s work within the reach of middle-class readers. Over the next few decades, the essential shelf of books in nearly every British home grew. At one time, every reader could have been expected to own at the very least a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s works were added to the list. And by century’s end, a dictionary—Johnson’s Dictionary—became a fixture in every literate household.
