The harmless drudge who defined a language

Somewhere in the middle of the most important English dictionary ever written, its author paused to define his own trade. A lexicographer, he wrote, is “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” He was describing the work he had been buried in for the better part of a decade — and he was describing himself. Samuel Johnson was many things: poet, essayist, critic, one of the most quoted talkers in the language. But when he looked in the mirror of his own book, he saw a drudge, and he said so.

That mixture — enormous labour worn lightly, and a refusal to pretend the work was grander than it was — is the whole character of A Dictionary of the English Language, published in London on 15 April 1755. It is one of the most famous books in English that almost nobody reads cover to cover, and it is worth knowing not as a museum piece but as an argument about how words work.

Nine years in a garret

The project began, as many great things do, with a contract and a wildly optimistic estimate. In 1746 a group of London booksellers agreed to pay Johnson 1,500 guineas to produce a dictionary of English. He reckoned he could do it in three years. It took him about nine.

He worked from a house in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, with a handful of copyists to help him cut and file the material. It was, by any sane measure, a task for an institution rather than a man. In France, the Académie française had set forty members to work on their national dictionary. Johnson enjoyed the comparison. His biographer James Boswell records him doing the arithmetic with some relish: forty Frenchmen over forty years came to sixteen hundred, “as three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.” It was a joke, but it carried a real boast underneath: one obstinate Londoner against a national academy.

The result was some 42,773 entries. It was not the first English dictionary — Robert Cawdrey had printed a little Table Alphabeticall of hard words back in 1604, and others had followed — but it was so much fuller, so much better read, and so much more alive than anything before it that it became the dictionary, the standard authority on written English for roughly a century and a half.

The idea that made it last

Here is the part that matters, and it is easy to miss under the sheer size of the thing. Johnson’s real innovation was not the definitions. It was what he set beside them.

Under almost every sense of almost every word, he printed quotations — sentences lifted from real English writers showing the word actually at work. He combed Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Bacon and the King James Bible, and by the end he had woven in roughly 114,000 quotations. A reader who wanted to know a word did not just get Johnson’s ruling on it; they got to watch the word behave, in a dozen real sentences, in the hands of people who knew how to use it.

He did not tell you what a word meant so much as show you the company it kept.

This was a quiet revolution. A bare definition is a claim, take it or leave it. A definition braced with quotations is evidence — a word caught in the act, doing the thing the definition only points at. Johnson understood that the meaning of a word is not a formula stored in a book; it is a pattern of use, and the honest way to capture it is to gather the uses and let them speak. Every serious dictionary since, the great Oxford English Dictionary above all, has been built on that principle.

A man in the margins

What keeps the Dictionary readable, though, is that Johnson never quite disappeared behind it. He was supposed to be a neutral recorder, and mostly he was; but now and then his opinions, his prejudices and his sense of humour leak onto the page, and those entries have been quoted for 270 years.

• Oats, he wrote, is “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people” — a dig at the Scots he never entirely lived down.
• Excise he called “a hateful tax levied upon commodities,” a definition so pointed it reportedly drew the attention of the excise commissioners.
• And under dull, having given the senses, he added the example almost anyone in his position would have felt: “To make dictionaries is dull work.”

The most human moment of all was not on the page but beside it. Boswell tells the story of a lady who asked Johnson how he came to define pastern as “the knee of a horse” — it is, in fact, part of the foot. He did not bluster or invent a justification. “Ignorance, madam,” he said, “pure ignorance.” A man who had defined tens of thousands of words was perfectly willing to admit he had got one plain thing wrong.

What a dictionary can and can’t do

Johnson had started, by his own account, half hoping he could fix the language — settle its spelling and meanings and hold them still. By the time he finished he knew better. In his preface he admitted, with some sadness, that no lexicographer can embalm a language or stop it changing; words drift, and the best a dictionary can do is keep faithful pace. That humility is why the book aged so gracefully. He was not laying down the law. He was taking careful, loving notes on a thing that was alive and would keep moving after he put down his pen.

Where vocabla fits

Johnson’s 114,000 quotations are, in the end, a very old answer to a very modern question: how do you actually come to know a word? Not, it turns out, by memorising a one-line gloss. A gloss is Johnson’s bare definition without the quotations underneath — a claim with no evidence, forgotten by lunchtime. You come to know a word the way his readers did: by meeting it in real sentences, in different hands and different rooms, until the pattern of its use is simply there in you.

That is the grain vocabla is cut along, in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian alike. A word is not handed to you as a formula to keep but met in the sentences where it lives, heard in many voices, and returned to often enough that its meaning arrives on its own, without translation. Johnson, the self-styled harmless drudge, spent nine years proving the point the long way round: you do not truly own a word until you have seen it used — and then seen it used again.