Johnson’s dictionary

A more significant milestone in the history of English lexicography for our purposes was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. It contains more than 42,000 entries – even then, only a small fraction of English vocabulary – and took seven years to write, an astonishing feat for a single individual. Johnson’s dictionary was not only the most comprehensive English dictionary of his time, but it was also among the first dictionaries to include illustrative quotations on a large scale.

What is most interesting for our purposes, though, are the idiosyncrasies of Johnson’s dictionary: what he included, what he left out, and how he defined various words in odd ways. Henry Hitchings notes that: 

. . . dictionaries are fraught with submerged ideas, narratives and histories. Johnson’s is no exception. It offers no overarching system of knowledge, but it is a literary anthology, a compendium of quotable nuggets, and a mine of information – some trivial, some considerable – on subjects as diverse as heraldry and hunting, rhetoric and pharmacy, oracles and literary style, the zodiac and magic, law and mathematics, ignorance and politics, the art of conversation and the benefits of reading.

Johnson’s dictionary, in other words, contains a lot about Johnson himself – both his interests and his prejudices. It was quite a comprehensive dictionary in its time. But Hitchings notes that Johnson still left out entries for such words as ultimatum, irritable, zinc, engineering, athlete, and annulment, even though he actually used some of those words in his definitions. On the other hand, he included such words as ariolation, clancular, deuteroscopy, and incompossiblity, which even the nineteenth-century American lexicographer Noah Webster considered dubious. And it has often been pointed out that some of Johnson’s definitions were odd, unhelpful, and occasionally downright wrong.

For example, the word urim is used by Milton, and therefore Johnson judged it important enough to be included even though he was unable to discern the meaning of the word from its literary context. Similarly, trolmydames is used in Shakespeare, and therefore it merited inclusion for Johnson – although, again, he had no idea what it meant. And what can we say about the definitions for network and worm? If you don’t already know what they mean, you won’t be enlightened by Johnson’s definitions!

As Hitchings implies in the passage quoted above, we can learn a lot about Johnson’s interests from his dictionary. For example, we can tell from Johnson’s entry for pastern that he had no particular knowledge of or interest in horses: he defines the pastern as the knee of a horse. People who are interested in horses know that a pastern is part of a horse’s foot. Similarly, as Hitchings points out, Johnson apparently had no interest in music. His definitions for a number of stringed instruments (viola, lute, guitar) are precisely the same: “a stringed instrument.” Furthermore, the definition of violin suffers from the cardinal lexicographical sin of circularity: the entry for violin sends one to the entry for fiddle, which in turn sends one back to violin.

These examples are not intended to imply that Johnson’s dictionary was incompetent – far from it, it was an amazing achievement for one man working alone for seven years. Much of it still holds up to twenty-first century scrutiny. For every entry that is obscure, weird, or unhelpful, there are a hundred that are brilliant and insightful. I devote this much attention to its deficiencies merely to point out that dictionaries are fallible, and often reflect the foibles of their makers.