A
DICTIONARY
OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE:
IN WHICH
The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS,
AND
ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS
BY
EXAMPLES from the best WRITERS.
TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED,
A HISTORY of the LANGUAGE,
AND
An ENGLISH GRAMMAR,
By SAMUEL JOHNSON, A. M.
In TWO VOLUMES.
Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet honesti:
Audebit, quaecumque parum splendoris habebunt.
Et sine pondere erunt, et honore indigna ferentur.
Verba movere loco; quamvis invita recedant,
Et versentur adhuc inter penetralia Vestae:
Obscurata diu populo bonus eruet, atque
Proferet in lucem speciosa vocabula rerum,
Quae priscis memorata Catonibus atque Cethegis,
Nunc situs informis premit et deserta vetustas. Hor.
LONDON
Printed by W. Strahan,
For J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes;
A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley.
MDCCLV
and 
. It also participates in the
Felcitations and good luck joining the select club of those who have read the whole book.
Brandi,
What a wonderful website! I still remember hauling both volumes of Johnson’s 1755 up four flights of stairs at the University of Maryland…that was a workout!! I am glad that someone is putting it online. Just out of curiosity, how many visitors do you get per day?? good luck
greg
Thanks Greg!
The site currently gets an average of 250 page views a day (this average has been increasing steadily each week). I haven’t been tracking how many unique visitors it gets per day.
Congratulations!
This is a wonderful and much needed website – particularly for me who writes novels set between 1740 and 1780s England!
I love delving into my facsimile edition of Johnson’s Dictionary just for fun of it – but this website will make researching that much easier.
Thank you!
Wow! thanks for all of the work. I’m currently taking a class on Samuel Johnson’s works and this certainly beats lugging the big tome from home to campus. Thanks again.
Please note that, with approbation befitting his subject, Melville mentions Johnson’s Lexicon in Chapter 104 of Moby Dick.
Thanks, Art, for the tip! It has inspired a new page on the site: Johnson’s Dictionary in Literature
The words, Ian, pay attention to the words….
….advise from ‘English’ Bob
Thank you for the tremendous effort involved in making this available. It is a valuable reference tool, and I will credit it in my thesis.
Thank you so much for this much-desired fabulous work. May I know when you expect to complete digitalizing the entire dictionary? Many thanks.
Hsiu-ling Lin
I don’t have an estimated date of completion. I do hope, however, to finish it in less time than Johnson spent writing it
It mostly depends on how far behind I am in my work and personal matters. Progress has been slow the last couple of months due to health issues, but I will hopefully be able to pick up the slack soon.
In the mean time, make use of “Page View” to look at the entries that haven’t been transcribed yet. If there are particular words that you would like to see transcribed, please contact me – I try to transcribe requested entries within 24 hours.