Editor in want of a dictionary
A good editor possessed of a copy-editing job must be in want of a dictionary. Today this dictionary will be Oxford, Chambers or, perhaps, Collins. Dozens of editors, copy-editors, proofreaders and printers are constantly revising and updating modern dictionaries. Powerful computers scan and monitor the internet and hard copy, books, magazines, journals and newspapers for nuanced changes to word meanings. It is an industry.
The great lexicographer
But the first “proper” dictionary was the work of one man, Samuel Johnson, with a team of six helpers. Before this there had been dictionaries but they were little more than word lists.
It took nine years to compile and defined 40,000 words in 2,300 pages. There were 120,000 quotations to exemplify meanings. Nuance was all. Each word was shown in the context of usage.
There were delays! Type had to be constantly reused and redistributed. The printers and publishers despaired of the great work ever being finished. At last the final batch of the manuscript was delivered to Millar, the printer, from Gough Square, where Johnson worked. The messenger returned to Johnson.
“What did he say?” asked Johnson.
He said, “Thank God I have done with him.”
Johnson’s World of Words
This phrase strikes a modern chord. It could be the title of a contemporary book. But it was how a reviewer in 1755 described Johnson’s Dictionary. It took the English-speaking world by storm.
The Académie Française had a team of forty working on the definitive French Dictionary. But Samuel Johnson beat them to it! In want of a dictionary themselves, they had been labouring for many years. David Garrick celebrated with a little jingoism:
Johnson, well-armed, like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more!
Poor Samuel
Johnson was a poor man and had slept rough in his early London days. And the Dictionary made him no richer. He was paid £1,575 by a consortium of publishers. But it was a ten-year project and his team had to be paid. His premises had to be paid for. He made no profit! The publishers on the other hand… Writers beware!
Johnson’s achievement was great. He set the standard for all future dictionaries. The methods he used were adopted by Oxford and all succeeding publishers.
Sadly, the achievement brought him little joy. The project had been long; his wife had died, the people he wished to please were no more. He lived on in a “gloom of solitude”. He therefore dismissed his great dictionary with “frigid tranquility” and “had little to fear or hope from censure or from praise”.