Whilst not the first and consigned to full a gaping gap in the book market as the public readership and booksellers were dissatisfied with available grammars and lexicons, the rather heroic and singular academic undertaking by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language—first published on this day in 1755, was highly influential and considered the authoritative reference source until the introduction of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Compiled over seven years, Johnson produced more than just a glossary of jargon or foreign concordance but rather a comprehensive, well-organised accounting of the English language—with over forty-two thousand entries, he proclaimed he was Vasta mole superbus (“Proud of its great volume”)—the word list was annotated with parts of speech and accentuated with literary citations, mostly drawn from the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton and the poetry of John Dryden, which were illustrative and often humorous, as in the titular definition of his vocation, and versified for effect, courtesy of Jonathan Swift, et al.: Opulence—wealth; riches; affluence
“There in full opulence a banker dwelt,
Who all the joys and pangs of riches felt;
His sideboard glitter’d with imagin’d plate,
And his proud fancy held a vast estate.”
Johnson’s work established the paradigm for standard dictionary entries with etymological speculation, usage and a guide to pronunciation and when the OED became its definitive successor some one hundred seventy years later, reproducing many of the former’s definitions, marking them with a J., judging his scholarship expedient and judicious to copy.
