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Lynch, "How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary" - 0 views

andromeda.rutgers.edu/...firstdict.html

shared by Ariel Szuch on 22 Nov 10 - Cached

ESTC tells me there were 663 English books published before 1755 with the word "dictionary" in the title; Robin Alston's monumental bibliography tells me Johnson's is the 177th printing of a general monolingual English dictionary; if we exclude subsequent editions and reprints, looking only at the first printing of each title, it's the twenty-first general monolingual English dictionary. And yet, to the world at large, it remains number one.
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Macaulay, for instance, famously called it "the first dictionary which could be read with pleasure." 1
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For him, "first" means primus inter pares — first in our affection, if not in our chronologies.
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...2 more annotations...
I call it "the first 'standard' dictionary," I say it's the first to make extensive use of illustrative quotations, and I quote Allen Reddick's claim that "Johnson's Dictionary was the first to attempt . . . to determine its meanings according to word usage as it was encountered in the works of the authors in the language" — related to, but not exactly the same as, the first to include extensive illustrative quotations.
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If it's possible to say anything uncontroversial about Johnson's prescriptivism, it would be that Johnson is more prescriptive than most modern lexicographers, but also less prescriptive than most of his contemporaries expected him to be. I'd remind you, though, that a dictionary needn't be prescriptive in its intentions to provide a definitive standard; it's possible to be authoritative without being authoritarian. The OED, perhaps the most thoroughly descriptive major dictionary ever completed, is today routinely used prescriptively. A search of LexisNexis or similar databases for the phrase "according to the Oxford English Dictionary" is instructive: linguistic scolds routinely turn to it for authoritative guidance on what's right and wrong, even though its editors from Murray through Simpson explicitly disavowed any such intention.
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