A Dictionary of the English Language
book by Samuel Johnson
A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson. It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.
There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £300,000 in 2025. Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.
Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".
Background
In earlier times, books had been regarded with something approaching veneration, but by the mid-eighteenth century this was no longer the case. The rise of literacy among the general public, combined with the technical advances in the mechanics of printing and bookbinding, meant that for the first time, books, texts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers were widely available to the general public at a reasonable cost.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “A Dictionary of the English Language” is book by Samuel Johnson. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dictionary, English and Language, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1210346. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1755, 1746 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Dictionary of the English Language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.