Immortalised in Blackadder The Third as the corpulent, irascible man who has failed to record the words ‘pericombobulation’ and ‘contrafibularity’ in his new dictionary, who exactly was Dr Johnson, and why did his book prove so influential?

It was in 1755 that Dr Johnson must have leaned back with a sigh of relief, with eight years’ work behind him, and a large, scholarly book in front of him. This was his Dictionary of the English Language, which contained some 40,000 words and 114,000 quotations to explain and illustrate those words.

This dictionary had been commissioned by a number of London booksellers, frustrated with the creative nature of the English language, which meant that individuals spelled words in a variety of ways, or according to how they felt they should be spelled. Johnson had agreed, believing that the language was a confusing mess – but he came to regret his decision to compile a dictionary, for as he worked on his magnum opus, he learned that language is by its nature always changing, and that he could only record the language as it was in the mid-18th century, rather than to fix it as a definitive way of writing.

When it was finally published in April 1755, the book expressed not only the nature of the English language, but also Dr Johnson’s personality. Despite having a team of helpers to work on the dictionary with him, many of the entries betrayed his own views on matters: he used such gobbledegook in places that he was believed to have made up some of the words (and, indeed, may well have done), and sometimes voiced his own strong opinions. For example, he defined ‘oats’ as being something the English fed their horses, but that the Scots fed themselves – suggesting English superiority to their northern neighbours. Johnson was known for his pomposity, and his definition of that word therefore plays up the positive aspects of this trait: to Johnson, being pompous was the same as being ‘splendid, magnificent’. Other examples of words in the dictionary include ‘compendiarious’ (a summary or abridged version of something), ‘yux’ (a hiccup), ‘glabrity’ (baldness), and the more familiar ‘yellow’ (‘being of a bright glaring colour’) as well as the letter ‘X’, which, Johnson notes, ‘though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language’.

The man who created this masterpiece had started compiling it at the age of 38, and saw it published when he was just short of 46. A native of Lichfield in Staffordshire, he was renowned for his writing – a combination of literature, biographies, plays and poetry. His father, Michael, was a bookseller, and when the young Samuel Johnson showed a precocity and intelligence unusual in a child, his parents showed him off, much to his embarrassment. He soaked up knowledge learned during his education, especially during his time at Lichfield Grammar School. His father, though, was hugely in debt, and his future was unclear. Sam started to help his father stitch books, which gave him the chance to extend his reading. When his mother’s relative left him some money, he was able to start at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he should have succeeded – but he was, by his own admission, ‘idle’, and this, together with a lack of money, forced him to leave prior to gaining a degree. It was only in 1755 – the same year his dictionary was published – that Oxford University awarded him a degree, a Master of Arts.

He now started to write in seriousness, alongside various teaching jobs, for the Birmingham Journal, and writing his own books. He survived financially thanks to his new wife – in his mid-20s, he had married Tetty, a 45-year-old widow and mother of three, whose money she gladly used to keep her husband writing.

Eventually, in June 1746, Johnson signed a contract worth 1500 guineas to write a dictionary, having been approached by a group of publishers including William Strahan. Johnson was overly confident in telling them he could write the dictionary in three years, and instead, had to employ several assistants to help him, using his own library of books to help him compile his entries. By the end of the nearly nine years it took to write the dictionary, his books were falling apart. In addition, Tetty had become seriously ill, and eventually, he moved to a property at 17 Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where he could make as much mess and noise as he wanted.

He was certainly prolific during this time, as he did not work solely on the dictionary – he also managed to write several other essays and poems. However, his wife didn’t live to see the dictionary published; Tetty died three years before it was finished, in 1752. Johnson blamed himself for her death, believing he had neglected her and forced her to live in virtual poverty.

The dictionary assured Dr Johnson’s place in history, becoming the most popular British dictionary in use for the next 150 years. It was only when the Oxford English Dictionary was completed that Johnson’s Dictionary slipped from its place at the top of the reference books. Johnson’s Dictionary was finished in 1755, and it’s remarkable that it took until 1857 for work to begin on a competitor. The Oxford English Dictionary started to be compiled that year, but only started to be published – as a work in progress, consisting of entries from A to Ant – in 1884, making Johnson’s efforts seem positively Herculean. A completed version was only published in 1928.

However, the two publications are quite different; the OED aims to trace the development of the English language as well as its current usage, and its second edition – a century after the first – comprised nearly 22,000 pages and 59 million words. Johnson’s dictionary originated with a group of London booksellers; the OED also started as idea from a group of London-based individuals, who were not, surprisingly, part of Oxford University but were intellectuals nevertheless. After 13 years of planning a new dictionary, this group – part of the Philological Society – started looking for words that weren’t defined very well in the existing dictionaries, and decided there was a need to record the history of English, including words that had become obsolete, and the earliest recorded uses of other words.

Their realisation that this would involve a huge number of words, and create a far larger dictionary than those that had previously been published, led to a formal project to create a comprehensive dictionary, involving volunteers being given different books to read, noting passages that illustrated certain words onto slips of paper (one of the dictionary’s many readers would be the novelist Charlotte Yonge).

The project’s first editor was Herbert Coleridge, who set out his plan for the dictionary in the spring of 1860. Sadly, however, just a year later, he died of TB, aged 30, and the editorship passed onto Frederick Furnivall. He faced his own problems with staffing: some of his volunteers, who weren’t well trained, either lost interest and left, or weren’t methodical in their work, and the organisation of the project was also problematic. Despite these problems, Furnivall’s editorship lasted until 1879, when he handed over the reins to Scottish lexicographer James Murray.

By the 1890s, there was another editor, and a separate office for the dictionary’s staff at Broad Street in the centre of Oxford. Yet by the end of the century, not even half of the dictionary had been compiled, and work continued throughout the First World War – and beyond James Murray’s death in 1915 – until, in 1928, the entries for Z were finally completed. Back in 1908, when the words between ‘polygenous’ and ‘premious’ were published, the newspapers eagerly reported the fact, with it being noted that this section of the dictionary alone comprised 3,245 main words, and nearly 20,000 quotations. In comparison, the equivalent section of Johnson’s dictionary comprised only 514 words and just over 1,300 quotations. As the Edwardian press noted, ‘thus has the science of lexicography progressed in a century and a half.’

The Oxford English Dictionary also provided the opportunity to learn something of British social history. For example, the word ‘post’ enabled readers to learn of the history of the Post Office, and the old custom of horses and riders being stationed along post-roads, each being required to ride to the next horse with the King’s ‘packet’ and, later, other people’s letters. The word ‘potato’, on the other hand, comprised five columns of definitions, history and quotes about this humble vegetable, including a 16th century reference to raw potatoes having ‘the taste of rawe chestnuttes’, but being ‘sumwhat sweeter’!

Both Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and the OED demonstrate the sheer breadth and complexity of the English language, and how it has changed over time.

Johnson received criticism for his idiosyncratic approach towards his dictionary, and his lack of impartiality in his definitions, but the otherwise widespread praise he got suggests not only that there was a recognised need for the English language to be gathered together and ‘explained’, but that it was also recognised what a huge task this was. The time and resources involved in assembling the Oxford English Dictionary – and which continues to be spent in updating and revising it – shows that just as English was a living and constantly evolving language in Johnson’s time, it continues to be such today.