Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
By Samuel Johnson
It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life,to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by theprospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise;to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, wheresuccess would have been without applause, and diligence withoutreward.
Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whommankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science,the pionier of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clearobstructions from the paths through which Learning and Genius pressforward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on thehumble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other authourmay aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escapereproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet grantedto very few.
I have, notwithstanding this discouragement, attempted a dictionaryof the English language, which, while it was employed in thecultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hithertoneglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, intowild exuberance; resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion; andexposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.
When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speechcopious without order, and energetick without rules: whereverI turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, andconfusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundlessvariety, without any established principle of selection; adulterationswere to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modesof expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages ofany writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.
Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar, I appliedmyself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might beof use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulatedin time the materials of a dictionary, which, by degrees, I reducedto method, establishing to myself, in the progress of the work,such rules as experience and analogy suggested to me; experience,which practice and observation were continually increasing; andanalogy, which, though in some words obscure, was evident in others.
In adjusting the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettledand fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularitiesthat are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it, fromothers which the ignorance or negligence of later writers hasproduced. Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient,and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among theimperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered,that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may notbe confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties andabsurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to corrector proscribe.
As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessaryor common use were spoken before they were written; and while theywere unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with greatdiversity, as we now observe those who cannot read catch soundsimperfectly, and utter them negligently. When this wild and barbarousjargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endeavouredto express, as he could, the sounds which he was accustomed topronounce or to receive, and vitiated in writing