[PDF] A Dictionary Of The English Language An Anthology eBook

Author : Samuel Johnson
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 852 pages
File Size : 18,5 MB
Release : 2006-11-30
Category : Reference
ISBN : 0141902868

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Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, published in 1755, marked a milestone in a language in desperate need of standards. No English dictionary before it had devoted so much space to everyday words, been so thorough in its definitions, or illustrated usage by quoting from Shakespeare and other great writers. Johnson's was the dictionary used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Brontës and the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. This new edition, edited by David Crystal, will contain a selection from the original, offering memorable passages on subjects ranging from books and critics to dreams and ethics.

Author : Henry Hitchings
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 43,56 MB
Release : 2006-10-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1429928948

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By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Sensing the deficit, and impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret of his London home to the creation of his own giant dictionary. Johnson imagined that he could complete the job in three years. But the complexity of English meant that his estimate was wildly inadequate. Only after he had expended nearly a decade of his prime on the task did the dictionary finally appear - magisterial yet quirky, dogmatic but generous of spirit, and steeped in the richness of English literature. It would come to be seen as the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century, and its influence fanned out across Europe and throughout Britain's colonies - including, crucially, America. Brilliantly entertaining and enlightening, Defining the World is the story of Johnson's heroic endeavor, 250 years after the first publication of the Dictionary. In alphabetically sequenced chapters, Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's adventure - his ambition and vision, his moments of despair, the mistakes he made along the way, and his ultimate triumph.

Author : Sarah Ogilvie
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 37,80 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1107021839

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Demonstrates that the Oxford English Dictionary is an international product in both its content and its making.

Author : Rebecca Shapiro
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 24,21 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
ISBN : 9781611488098

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We all think we know what a dictionary is for and how to use one, and go right to the words we wish to look up. Yet dictionary users have not always known how English 'works' and this book reproduces and examines important texts in which early dictionary authors explain choices and promote ideas. Fixing Babel provides authoritative transcriptions of documents from the front matter of major English dictionaries over a two-hundred-year period. It also provides commentary on, and annotation of, a wide range of lexicographical concerns.

Author : Peter Martin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 33,13 MB
Release : 2020-09-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0691210179

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Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.