This is the printer-friendly layout. Click here to find the
online format. The Author of the 250-Year-Old Dictionary Was a
True Man of the Word by Ian Hunter Two and a half centuries ago
this year, the first comprehensive Dictionary of the English
Language was published. The lexicographer (def. “a writer of
dictionaries, a harmless drudge”) was Dr. Samuel Johnson, better
known then as an essayist and moralist, and (as is more obvious
now than then) a serious Christian in a deistic, even skeptical
age. Nine years earlier, a bookseller named Robert Dodsley asked
the 36-year-old Johnson about compiling a dictionary. Dodsley
considered it a rebuke to national pride that England lacked
anything to equal the great dictionaries of France and Italy,
each the product of teams of academics. At first Johnson
declined, but when a consortium of London booksellers offered
1,575 guineas (today about $150,000), the chronically
impoverished Johnson relented. The contract called for the
dictionary to be delivered in three year