ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language is one of the most famous dictionaries in history. First published in 1755, the dictionary took just over eight years to compile, required six helpers and listed 40, 000 words.

Detailed explanation-2: -Summary. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) has long had a reputation as the ‘first English dictionary’, despite the dozens of dictionaries that had appeared in the century and a half before Johnson’s.

Detailed explanation-3: -Samuel Johnson did not write the first English dictionary, a fact that often is overlooked, despite the efforts of a number of superb Johnson scholars, such as Jack Lynch, to disabuse the world of this notion. But he did write the first American dictionary.

Detailed explanation-4: -Johnson’s great contribution to the history of English lexicography was to conceive the dictionary, not as a schoolroom prop, but as a type of literary work. Johnson wrote only one dictionary, but in that one he initiated several dictionary genres.

Detailed explanation-5: -First published in 1755, this dictionary took Johnson and his small team of helpers nine years to compile, and was unsurpassed as a reference work for over a century until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884.