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| | If
Dr Johnson was writing today surely the internet would have been his best friend.
The
man of letters would have been able to get his message across the world in a matter
of minutes!
It's
hard to believe that it's 250 years since his dictionary was compiled and published.
Along with the Bible or other religious texts, it's probably a book that every
bookcase holds.
| Unusual
words in Johnson's Dictionary |
Giglet - a wanton
Fopdoodle
- a fool
Dandiprat
- an urchin
Jobbernowl
- a block head | Mind
you, with the fast growth of the internet, online dictionaries are now part of
everyday life - even your computer programme probably has a spell checker!
And
it's all thanks to the mighty achievement of this man from Staffordshire.
The
man
Johnson was born in Lichfield on September 18th, 1709 - and you can
still visit his house there (see our guide
to his house).
His father was a book seller, so books and the love of
language were in his blood.
| Words
in the Dictionary with different meanings now! |
Fireman
- a man of violent passions
Orgasm - sudden vehemence
Pedant - a schoolmaster(!)
Urinator - a diver; one who searches under water
Jogger - one who moves heavily
and dully | It's
incredible to think that he worked almost single handedly for eight years to complete
the book.
He would read pages and pages of books, marking passages which explained
the meanings of words and would then pass these to a group of poorly paid copyists
who wrote them out on slips of paper.
Dr Johnson's dictionary wasn't the
first to be published, but it's the one that all the poets and authors turned
to for help and it's the basis of the books that we use today.
Anniversary
The
actual 250th anniversary of the original Dictionary Of The English Language is
on
Friday April 15, 2005.
The
first edition was a cumbersome 2,300-page volume weighing about 22lbs, the weight
of a large turkey. In Johnson's lifetime five further editions were published
and a sixth came out when he died.
When it first came out in 1755 it cost
£4/10/-, which would be worth around £300 today.
Words words
words
Johnson's harvest of 42,773 words, for which he was paid £1,575
(around £100,000 today), doesn't sound like much when you consider that
English actually comprised between 250,000 and 300,000 words at that time.
To mark the 250th anniversary, author Henry Hitchings has written Dr Johnson's
Dictionary:
The Extraordinary Story Of The Book That Defined The World.
Johnson's definitions
were peppered with his own feelings and prejudices, Hitchings observes.
"For
example, Johnson wasn't a big fan of people from Scotland, for reasons which are
unclear, but his definition of oats is: "a grain which in England
is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"(!)
Johnson
is a fascinating character. His life - and livelier quotations - are as famous
as his works (remember the hilarious Blackadder episode?)
| Things
Said About Him | |
"To illustrate
the meanings of words, Johnson supplied 114,000 quotations from books…it
made his dictionary into a superior prototype of the internet." John Carey. |
In the
19th century the Oxford English Dictionary attempted to replace Johnson's.
There
was a feeling that Johnson's dictionary had limitations and that a good dictionary
of English shouldn't be made by one person, but by a team of people.
However,
around 1,700 of Johnson's definitions remain in the OED, says Hitchings, which
proves he was on the right track. |
