'Better to Have a Distinct Word for Each Sense'

On Monday, March 23, [1772], I found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary.” 

Dr. Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary on April 15, 1755, two-hundred-seventy years ago. It contained some 42,000 entries and he had worked on it for seven years. It’s great innovation, the reason we still read it, are the 114,00 citations that accompany the entries. The Dictionary can be read as an anthology of English literature (the way Jefferson read it), with Johnson relying most heavily on Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Pope and Dryden. As a young man, Robert Browning read the Dictionary in order to “qualify” as an author. Samuel Beckett found words to recycle into his own work. Boswell continues in his Life:

 

“Mr. Peyton, one of his original amanuenses, was writing for him. I put him in mind of a meaning of the word side, which he had omitted, viz. relationship; as father’s side, mother’s side [see definition eight]. He inserted it.”

 

The Dictionary is a substantial volume, built to last. By “folio,” Boswell means the pages measured eighteen inches by twenty inches – larger than most books published today. I enjoy comparing Johnson's entries with those in the Oxford English Dictionary, which often cites Johnson. 

 

“I asked him if humiliating was a good word. He said, he had seen it frequently used, but he did not know it to be legitimate English. [Johnson omitted the word.] He would not admit civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses, which civility is, in his way of using it.”

 

A second edition followed a few weeks after the first. It was published in 165 weekly sections. The third edition followed in 1765. The fourth, which came out in 1773, included heavy revisions of the original work by Johnson, who identified himself as a lexicographer, defined as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”