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Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language
Samuel Johnson’s 2,300-page Dictionary of the English Language , published in 1755, marked a milestone in a language that was in desperate need of standards. It was the first English dictionary to devote so much space to everyday words, to be so resoundingly thorough in its definition, and to illustrate usage by quoting from Shakespeare and other great writers. For the next 150 years, until the arrival of the Oxford English Dictionary , Johnson’s Dictionary would define the language, used, as it was, by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge--and by all of America’s founding fathers.
This new edition contains more than 3,100 selections faithfully adapted from the original by Jack Lynch. Etymology, definitions, and illustrative passages appear in their entirety. Three helpful new indexes have been created out of entries in this edition, and in addition, Johnson’s “The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language,” written eight years before the Dictionary and seldom seen in print, is reproduced in its entirety.
This new edition contains more than 3,100 selections faithfully adapted from the original by Jack Lynch. Etymology, definitions, and illustrative passages appear in their entirety. Three helpful new indexes have been created out of entries in this edition, and in addition, Johnson’s “The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language,” written eight years before the Dictionary and seldom seen in print, is reproduced in its entirety.
656 pages, Paperback
Published January 9, 2007
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April 25, 2020
‘Dictionaries are like watches,’ as Samuel Johnson said in one of his many slightly tiresome aphorisms: ‘the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.’ He gave himself sufficient wriggle-room there, which he makes use of in the Dictionary in a number of entries that just say ‘Of this word I know not the meaning’. I find this rather admirable, although it must have been a bit annoying to people looking things up.
This is one of the best cut-downs of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language that I've seen – most other abridgements tend to cut out the quotations or trim the number of senses, with a view to including more headwords. But here, editor Jack Lynch has picked a smaller number of entries, but given them all in full. This is infinitely preferable, since no one is reading a dictionary from 1755 for comprehensiveness of definitions, but rather for some flavour of eighteenth-century lexicography, or of Johnson's writing style, or of how his Dictionary works, all of which are perfectly represented here.
Considering how much Samuel Johnson loved to tell other people they were wrong, it's amazing how unproscriptive his Dictionary is. To be sure, he can't stop himself often commenting that something is ‘A bad word’, but at least he includes it in the first place, and gives evidence of where it's been used in literature. He never starts from his idea of a word's definition, and looks for citations of it; instead, he starts by looking at citations from literature, and derives the definitions from this real-world usage. It was a ‘descriptive’ model that has survived to make the modern Oxford English Dictionary (which built on Johnson) the greatest in the world.
He was criticised at the time for including too many ‘inkhorn words’, i.e. obscure terms that nobody really uses (e.g. mundivagant ‘wandering through the world’). This was easy to satirise, and still is; no one of my age and provenance will be able to pick this up without the scene from Blackadder coming to mind:
Actually, though, what's impressive about the Dictionary is how few obscure words Johnson includes, proportionally, compared to other wordbooks of the time. The vast majority of the book consists of regular terminology, which for a modern reader is often fascinating – we can catch the current state of science and knowledge in many of these entries:
(Uranus would be discovered in the 1780s, and Neptune not till the middle of the nineteenth century.) The same can be said for many political terms like republican ‘One who thinks a commonwealth without monarchy the best government’ – a dirty word for an arch-Tory like Johnson. And if you read a lot of literature from the time, many of these definitions can be helpful in ways that a small modern dictionary cannot; consulting a Pocket Oxford will not help you understand what, for instance, Austen meant by sensibility (defined by Johnson as ‘Quickness of sensation’ or ‘Quickness of perception’).
Similarly, Georgian novels are forever referring to ‘chairmen’, which might give some casual readers the impression that London was full of boards of directors, unless you appreciate that the primary definition of chairman was ‘One whose trade it is to carry a [sedan] chair’. Also useful are the definitions of a word like nice, whose eight senses include ‘accurate in judgment to minute exactness’, ‘delicate’ and ‘fastidious’ – but not ‘pleasant’, a meaning which was only just beginning to emerge as Johnson wrote.
Lynch, who is (or was) the editor of a Johnson journal, has clearly put this together as a labour of love, and it shows – it's a beautifully produced and typeset book, and comes bulging with handy bibliographies, indices of quotations, and thematic lists of vocabulary covered. It's an utter joy to browse through – which restores to Johnson's landmark, for a modern reader, the pleasure of any great dictionary.
This is one of the best cut-downs of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language that I've seen – most other abridgements tend to cut out the quotations or trim the number of senses, with a view to including more headwords. But here, editor Jack Lynch has picked a smaller number of entries, but given them all in full. This is infinitely preferable, since no one is reading a dictionary from 1755 for comprehensiveness of definitions, but rather for some flavour of eighteenth-century lexicography, or of Johnson's writing style, or of how his Dictionary works, all of which are perfectly represented here.
Considering how much Samuel Johnson loved to tell other people they were wrong, it's amazing how unproscriptive his Dictionary is. To be sure, he can't stop himself often commenting that something is ‘A bad word’, but at least he includes it in the first place, and gives evidence of where it's been used in literature. He never starts from his idea of a word's definition, and looks for citations of it; instead, he starts by looking at citations from literature, and derives the definitions from this real-world usage. It was a ‘descriptive’ model that has survived to make the modern Oxford English Dictionary (which built on Johnson) the greatest in the world.
He was criticised at the time for including too many ‘inkhorn words’, i.e. obscure terms that nobody really uses (e.g. mundivagant ‘wandering through the world’). This was easy to satirise, and still is; no one of my age and provenance will be able to pick this up without the scene from Blackadder coming to mind:
Dr. Samuel Johnson: Here it is, sir. The very cornerstone of English scholarship. This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved language.
Blackadder: Every single one, sir?
Dr. Samuel Johnson: Every single word, sir!
Blackadder: Oh, well, in that case, sir, I hope you will not object if I also offer the Doctor my most enthusiastic contrafibularities.
Dr. Samuel Johnson: …What?
Blackadder: "Contrafibularities", sir? It is a common word down our way.
Dr. Samuel Johnson: Damn!
[he scribbles in the book]
Blackadder: Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'm anaspeptic – phrasmotic – even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
Actually, though, what's impressive about the Dictionary is how few obscure words Johnson includes, proportionally, compared to other wordbooks of the time. The vast majority of the book consists of regular terminology, which for a modern reader is often fascinating – we can catch the current state of science and knowledge in many of these entries:
plánet n.s. [planeta, Lat. πλαναω; planette, Fr.] Planets are the erratic or wandering stars, and which are not like the fixt ones always in the same position to one another: we now number the earth among the primary planets, because we know it moves round the sun, as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury do, and that in a circle between Mars and Venus…
(Uranus would be discovered in the 1780s, and Neptune not till the middle of the nineteenth century.) The same can be said for many political terms like republican ‘One who thinks a commonwealth without monarchy the best government’ – a dirty word for an arch-Tory like Johnson. And if you read a lot of literature from the time, many of these definitions can be helpful in ways that a small modern dictionary cannot; consulting a Pocket Oxford will not help you understand what, for instance, Austen meant by sensibility (defined by Johnson as ‘Quickness of sensation’ or ‘Quickness of perception’).
Similarly, Georgian novels are forever referring to ‘chairmen’, which might give some casual readers the impression that London was full of boards of directors, unless you appreciate that the primary definition of chairman was ‘One whose trade it is to carry a [sedan] chair’. Also useful are the definitions of a word like nice, whose eight senses include ‘accurate in judgment to minute exactness’, ‘delicate’ and ‘fastidious’ – but not ‘pleasant’, a meaning which was only just beginning to emerge as Johnson wrote.
Lynch, who is (or was) the editor of a Johnson journal, has clearly put this together as a labour of love, and it shows – it's a beautifully produced and typeset book, and comes bulging with handy bibliographies, indices of quotations, and thematic lists of vocabulary covered. It's an utter joy to browse through – which restores to Johnson's landmark, for a modern reader, the pleasure of any great dictionary.
October 29, 2018
For over 20 years, I've had a copy of Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection, edited by E.L. McAdam and George Milne (I bought my copy at Johnson's Gough Square house in London), and for the past few years I've had a digital version of the complete dictionary on my iPad. Both of these have proved to be less than totally satisfactory to me, for different reasons. But Jack Lynch's abridgement has proven to be the version I have been waiting for.
The strengths of this edition are many. Most importantly (to me, anyway), each of the chosen selections is included in full: etymology, definition(s), and illustrative quotations. This is a vast improvement over McAdam and Milne, who dispense with most of the quotations and only include those definitions they find interesting - they include only two definitions of "sensible," while Lynch's complete entry consists of eight definitions and eighteen quotations, and takes up nearly a page.
And the quotations are fascinating; as Henry Hitchings said in his book on the Dictionary, they make Johnson's work an anthology of English writing up to that point. Lynch's edition accentuates that aspect by including indexes of Shakespearean citations and of citations of other writers. There is also an index of "piquant terms."
That last index is a reminder that Johnson's Dictionary just makes for entertaining reading, due to Johnson's choices, biases, and sometimes mistakes. One of the most famous mistakes is the first definition of "pastern": "The knee of a horse." But until thumbing through this volume, I hadn't known that there is a second definition, with a wonderful illustration: "The legs of a human creature in contempt. So straight she walk'd, and on her pasterns high; If seeing her behind, he lik'd her pace, Now turning short, he better lik'd her face. Dryden"
Until I get that first edition for my birthday one of these years, Lynch's selection will be an excellent and practical substitute.
The strengths of this edition are many. Most importantly (to me, anyway), each of the chosen selections is included in full: etymology, definition(s), and illustrative quotations. This is a vast improvement over McAdam and Milne, who dispense with most of the quotations and only include those definitions they find interesting - they include only two definitions of "sensible," while Lynch's complete entry consists of eight definitions and eighteen quotations, and takes up nearly a page.
And the quotations are fascinating; as Henry Hitchings said in his book on the Dictionary, they make Johnson's work an anthology of English writing up to that point. Lynch's edition accentuates that aspect by including indexes of Shakespearean citations and of citations of other writers. There is also an index of "piquant terms."
That last index is a reminder that Johnson's Dictionary just makes for entertaining reading, due to Johnson's choices, biases, and sometimes mistakes. One of the most famous mistakes is the first definition of "pastern": "The knee of a horse." But until thumbing through this volume, I hadn't known that there is a second definition, with a wonderful illustration: "The legs of a human creature in contempt. So straight she walk'd, and on her pasterns high; If seeing her behind, he lik'd her pace, Now turning short, he better lik'd her face. Dryden"
Until I get that first edition for my birthday one of these years, Lynch's selection will be an excellent and practical substitute.
December 5, 2021
The work was enormous.
Writing in some 80 large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of in excess of 40,000 words, illustrating their countless meanings with about 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on each subject -- on food, philosophy, fashion and merriment, from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, via Milton, to his own time.
He did not, he admitted, expect to achieve absolute novelty. Working to a deadline, essentially on his own, he had to draw on the best of all previous dictionaries, making his work a heroic synthesis. In fact, it was very much more.
Unlike his predecessors, Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. He adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law – according to precedent.
Many of the most knowledgeable writers and intellectuals of mid-18th-century London called Samuel Johnson (1709–84) the most radiant man of his era. Adam Smith said, ‘Johnson knew more books than any man alive’, and Edmund Burke thought that if Johnson had gone to Parliament he would have been certainly ‘the greatest speaker that ever was.’
Although he was a man of self-effacing means and abnormal mannerisms, Johnson was commissioned by London booksellers to create a reliable English dictionary, and he spent more than eight years immersed in the prodigious chore.
One of his few assistants was a former Jamaican slave, Francis Barber.
Johnson produced a ‘Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language’ on 30 April 1746 and on 18 June signed a contract with a conglomerate of booksellers. Work began right away: the first of his amanuenses, Francis Stewart, was paid an advance of three guineas, and began work on midsummer day.
A convolutedd plan of the dictionary appeared the following year. Johnson approached Lord Chesterfield, secretary of state, as a patron, but received petite support from him, so when Chesterfield sent two eulogistic but condescending papers at the end of 1754, a few months before the Dictionary’s publication, Johnson responded with a letter which has become renowned for its contemptuous refusal of their content.
The work had occupied seven years, with little financial support other than the booksellers’ advance. It took Johnson some three years to read his source works and mark the citations to be used. He underlined the word to be illustrated and wrote its initial letter as a capital in the margin.
The beginning and end of the extract were identified using vertical strokes. These were then copied by his assistants on to slips of paper and filed alphabetically.
Only after all slips were collated did he begin to draft definitions. Definitions and quotations were then pasted on to large sheets of paper, and these were sent for printing.
The first seventy sheets (A to Carry) were printed by the end of 1750, and further sections were gradually printed over the next three years. He was maybe surprised by the amount of space the entries took: letter A comprises 137 folio pages (40 × 25 cm), and by the end of letter C the book had reached 477 pages – 43 per cent of the first volume.
At that rate the whole dictionary would have made three or four folio volumes.
Later letters show greater economy in coverage and treatment. Even so, the two volumes jointly comprise 2,261 pages, exclusive of the 51 pages of preface matter (the Preface, an outline History of the English Language and an outline Grammar).
The work was complete by 1754, and an edition of 2,000 copies appeared on 15 April 1755, priced £4. 10s.
A few weeks later there was a second edition, published in 165 weekly sections at sixpence each. A third edition of 1,024 copies was published in 1765, to coincide with Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare.
And in 1771 he began a major revision of the work, which was published as the fourth edition in 1773. Other editions followed after his death. The work dominated British lexicography for over a century, continuing to be reprinted until the 1880s.
It only began to mislay its authority with the entrance of the ‘new’ English dictionary, edited by James Murray, the first part published in 1884, and the precursor of the present-day Oxford English Dictionary.
The dictionary’s 42,773 word entries included rarities such as odontálgick (pertaining to toothache) and some of its definitions were as idiosyncratic and amusing as Johnson himself.
He defines cough as ‘a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity’, and lexicographer as ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’
In the decades after its publication, the Dictionary was not gravely rivalled until the coming of The Oxford English Dictionary (1884), by which time some of Johnson’s definitions had passed into folklore:
*Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge…
*Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
*Whigs: The name of a faction.
The distinctive wit of the Dictionary and its definitions has obscured its remarkable grace and clarity:
*Heart: The muscle which by its contraction and dilation propels the blood through the course of circulation … It is supposed in popular language to be the seat sometimes of courage, sometimes of affection.
Johnson’s 12 definitions for a simple, but tricky, word like Thought display the fluency and accuracy of an exceptional intelligence:
1. The operation of the mind; the act of thinking.
2. Idea; image formed in the mind.
3. Sentiment; fancy; imagery; conceit.
4. Reflection; particular consideration.
5. Conception; preconceived notion.
6. Opinion; judgement.
7. Meditation; serious consideration.
8. Design; purpose.
9. Silent contemplation.
10. Solicitude; care; concern.
11. Expectation.
12. A small degree; a small quantity.
Another of Johnson’s wonderful innovations was to illustrate a word’s meanings by means of apt literary quotations – 114,000 of them – which he had taken from Shakespeare and 500 other authors from every branch of learning in a deed of astonishing scholarship and sophistication.
When it first appeared in 1755, Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was priced for the well-to-do and sold only a few thousand copies in its first decade.
Yet readers hailed the author as ‘England’s most distinguished man of letters’ and called his compendium the ‘greatest feat of scholarship’ of its time.
Later marketed in a cheaper shortened edition, the work became a big seller. Until the conclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, Johnson’s gem was usually viewed as the leading English-language dictionary, and literary scholars have long considered it one of the most significant works in the English language.
Some of Johnson’s original manuscripts, including his diary and drafts of his Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language, are housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library.
Copies of the original first edition of the dictionary have sold for as much as $250,000.
Allen Reddick has written at length about the original documents in The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773.
Writing in some 80 large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of in excess of 40,000 words, illustrating their countless meanings with about 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on each subject -- on food, philosophy, fashion and merriment, from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, via Milton, to his own time.
He did not, he admitted, expect to achieve absolute novelty. Working to a deadline, essentially on his own, he had to draw on the best of all previous dictionaries, making his work a heroic synthesis. In fact, it was very much more.
Unlike his predecessors, Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. He adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law – according to precedent.
Many of the most knowledgeable writers and intellectuals of mid-18th-century London called Samuel Johnson (1709–84) the most radiant man of his era. Adam Smith said, ‘Johnson knew more books than any man alive’, and Edmund Burke thought that if Johnson had gone to Parliament he would have been certainly ‘the greatest speaker that ever was.’
Although he was a man of self-effacing means and abnormal mannerisms, Johnson was commissioned by London booksellers to create a reliable English dictionary, and he spent more than eight years immersed in the prodigious chore.
One of his few assistants was a former Jamaican slave, Francis Barber.
Johnson produced a ‘Short Scheme for compiling a new Dictionary of the English Language’ on 30 April 1746 and on 18 June signed a contract with a conglomerate of booksellers. Work began right away: the first of his amanuenses, Francis Stewart, was paid an advance of three guineas, and began work on midsummer day.
A convolutedd plan of the dictionary appeared the following year. Johnson approached Lord Chesterfield, secretary of state, as a patron, but received petite support from him, so when Chesterfield sent two eulogistic but condescending papers at the end of 1754, a few months before the Dictionary’s publication, Johnson responded with a letter which has become renowned for its contemptuous refusal of their content.
The work had occupied seven years, with little financial support other than the booksellers’ advance. It took Johnson some three years to read his source works and mark the citations to be used. He underlined the word to be illustrated and wrote its initial letter as a capital in the margin.
The beginning and end of the extract were identified using vertical strokes. These were then copied by his assistants on to slips of paper and filed alphabetically.
Only after all slips were collated did he begin to draft definitions. Definitions and quotations were then pasted on to large sheets of paper, and these were sent for printing.
The first seventy sheets (A to Carry) were printed by the end of 1750, and further sections were gradually printed over the next three years. He was maybe surprised by the amount of space the entries took: letter A comprises 137 folio pages (40 × 25 cm), and by the end of letter C the book had reached 477 pages – 43 per cent of the first volume.
At that rate the whole dictionary would have made three or four folio volumes.
Later letters show greater economy in coverage and treatment. Even so, the two volumes jointly comprise 2,261 pages, exclusive of the 51 pages of preface matter (the Preface, an outline History of the English Language and an outline Grammar).
The work was complete by 1754, and an edition of 2,000 copies appeared on 15 April 1755, priced £4. 10s.
A few weeks later there was a second edition, published in 165 weekly sections at sixpence each. A third edition of 1,024 copies was published in 1765, to coincide with Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare.
And in 1771 he began a major revision of the work, which was published as the fourth edition in 1773. Other editions followed after his death. The work dominated British lexicography for over a century, continuing to be reprinted until the 1880s.
It only began to mislay its authority with the entrance of the ‘new’ English dictionary, edited by James Murray, the first part published in 1884, and the precursor of the present-day Oxford English Dictionary.
The dictionary’s 42,773 word entries included rarities such as odontálgick (pertaining to toothache) and some of its definitions were as idiosyncratic and amusing as Johnson himself.
He defines cough as ‘a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity’, and lexicographer as ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’
In the decades after its publication, the Dictionary was not gravely rivalled until the coming of The Oxford English Dictionary (1884), by which time some of Johnson’s definitions had passed into folklore:
*Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge…
*Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
*Whigs: The name of a faction.
The distinctive wit of the Dictionary and its definitions has obscured its remarkable grace and clarity:
*Heart: The muscle which by its contraction and dilation propels the blood through the course of circulation … It is supposed in popular language to be the seat sometimes of courage, sometimes of affection.
Johnson’s 12 definitions for a simple, but tricky, word like Thought display the fluency and accuracy of an exceptional intelligence:
1. The operation of the mind; the act of thinking.
2. Idea; image formed in the mind.
3. Sentiment; fancy; imagery; conceit.
4. Reflection; particular consideration.
5. Conception; preconceived notion.
6. Opinion; judgement.
7. Meditation; serious consideration.
8. Design; purpose.
9. Silent contemplation.
10. Solicitude; care; concern.
11. Expectation.
12. A small degree; a small quantity.
Another of Johnson’s wonderful innovations was to illustrate a word’s meanings by means of apt literary quotations – 114,000 of them – which he had taken from Shakespeare and 500 other authors from every branch of learning in a deed of astonishing scholarship and sophistication.
When it first appeared in 1755, Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was priced for the well-to-do and sold only a few thousand copies in its first decade.
Yet readers hailed the author as ‘England’s most distinguished man of letters’ and called his compendium the ‘greatest feat of scholarship’ of its time.
Later marketed in a cheaper shortened edition, the work became a big seller. Until the conclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, Johnson’s gem was usually viewed as the leading English-language dictionary, and literary scholars have long considered it one of the most significant works in the English language.
Some of Johnson’s original manuscripts, including his diary and drafts of his Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language, are housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library.
Copies of the original first edition of the dictionary have sold for as much as $250,000.
Allen Reddick has written at length about the original documents in The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773.
July 6, 2025
haters: "You're reading the dictionary?"
me (smugly): No, I'm reading a dictionary, Samuel Johnston's.
haters: why
me: how else would I know the about word "bepissed", and Sam J's hatred of the Scottish people?
(haters give me a well deserved wedgie)
me (smugly): No, I'm reading a dictionary, Samuel Johnston's.
haters: why
me: how else would I know the about word "bepissed", and Sam J's hatred of the Scottish people?
(haters give me a well deserved wedgie)
October 9, 2022
I don't have a paper copy, am using the on-line one at https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/...
I am not reading it cover to cover, of course, but am thoroughly enjoying looking up a random word 3 or 4 times/day. :-) I particularly like the supporting quotations. And given the time they are from, should give myself credit for a "Classic" or two. :-)
A particular interest is those words that certainly are used today, but mean NONE of the things Dr. Johnson identifies in definition or the quoted examples. E.g. creek.
And then there are the just weird ones (to me, who does cook):
Oa'tmeal. n.s. An herb.
Ainsworth.
October 22--have decided I have "read" enough to count it as read. :-) I'm sure I'll dip back into it here and there.
Relatively lots that simply are no longer in our vocabularies.
And--I added mentally, "the Scots." :-)
Bo'rderer. n.s. [from border.] He that dwells on the borders, extreme parts, or confines.
They of those marches, gracious sovereign!
Shall be a wall sufficient to defend
Our inland from the pilfering borderers.
Shakesp. Henry V.
Oh I like this one:
Dime'nsive. adj. [dimensus, Latin.] That which marks the boundaries or outlines.
All bodies have their measure, and their space;
But who can draw the soul’s dimensive lines?
Davies.
I am not reading it cover to cover, of course, but am thoroughly enjoying looking up a random word 3 or 4 times/day. :-) I particularly like the supporting quotations. And given the time they are from, should give myself credit for a "Classic" or two. :-)
A particular interest is those words that certainly are used today, but mean NONE of the things Dr. Johnson identifies in definition or the quoted examples. E.g. creek.
And then there are the just weird ones (to me, who does cook):
Oa'tmeal. n.s. An herb.
Ainsworth.
October 22--have decided I have "read" enough to count it as read. :-) I'm sure I'll dip back into it here and there.
Relatively lots that simply are no longer in our vocabularies.
And--I added mentally, "the Scots." :-)
Bo'rderer. n.s. [from border.] He that dwells on the borders, extreme parts, or confines.
They of those marches, gracious sovereign!
Shall be a wall sufficient to defend
Our inland from the pilfering borderers.
Shakesp. Henry V.
Oh I like this one:
Dime'nsive. adj. [dimensus, Latin.] That which marks the boundaries or outlines.
All bodies have their measure, and their space;
But who can draw the soul’s dimensive lines?
Davies.
August 21, 2012
one of the few dictionaries that has had me laughing out loud. for 'coffeehouse' johnson has, "a house of entertainment where coffee is sold, and guests are supplied with newspapers." a very nice browsing dictionary- not so much the sort for bouncing around comparing word histories and the like (for this see shipley's origins of english words, a very different work but also a very entertaining dictionary), but rather for just reading entries at random to find some quirky phrase or other. this edition does make me wish i had something closer to the unabridged dictionary- lynch seems to have edited this with an eye towards including obscure words that give a sense of the 18th century, which is nice, but i want more. for example, I remember seeing a reference to johnson's 'elephant' entry somewhere or other and was dissapointed not to find it included here. that said, the full text is in the public domain and available on the internet without having to pay for or lift the 2000+ pages of the original, so, whatever, this is a nice little sample to have on the dictionary shelf.
June 23, 2013
Well chosen selections from Samuel Johnson's 1755 masterpiece. Johnson was occasionally opinionated and sometimes even wrong (he wrote of the letter X that it "begins no word in the English language") but learned, entertaining, and dogged. It's a treat to browse through, although I read it cover to cover, or, as you like it. I did.
Read
September 23, 2007Johnson's version of this literary-reference dictionary was extensive-- this is a sampling from the 18th century genius' colleciton that Lynch, a scholar, has put together. If you love reading and language, this is a must! With this and the OED, you are set.
June 14, 2022
It's Johnson. What else must I say?
I obviously did not read this from cover to cover, but it is fun flipping through and finding funny definitions and archaic words.
I obviously did not read this from cover to cover, but it is fun flipping through and finding funny definitions and archaic words.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews