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Monday, July 25, 2011
He produced definitions for over 40,000 words, using at least 114,000 quotations to illustrate them. Some definitions are incorrect ("Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," he retorted when a lady asked why he had wrongly defined a part of the horse.) Others are clearly written for his own amusement (he defines a lexicographer, his own profession, as "a harmless drudge" and a patron (having failed to get one for himself) as "a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid in flattery.")
But despite these eccentricities, Johnson's dictionary is a mammoth feat, showing both the depth of his learning and his powers of endurance.
The first dictionary was invented by Henry Cockerman in 1623, but he only put "hard" words in it. He thought that it didn't need to have words that people already knew. John Kelsey modernized the dictionary so it had "everyday" words.
The dictionary went through five editions in the author's lifetime and remained the standard work until the first part of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in 1884.www.mannastores.com
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