Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language came out in two large folio volumes in 1755. A group of London booksellers had signed him up in June 1746, he promised it in three years, and it took him nearly nine. Its 42,773 entries rest on about 114,000 quotations from English writers, and a handful of its definitions, oats above all, are still quoted today (Dr Johnson's House, n.d.).
EdCitation publishes this account. Every definition below was read on 27 September 2026 in the digitised 1755 first folio at Johnson's Dictionary Online, and every story comes from a named source: Boswell's Life, the British Library, Dr Johnson's House, a 2024 peer-reviewed article and the linguist David Crystal. Where those sources disagree, and they often do on the numbers, we show both. A story we could not trace is marked unconfirmed.
Johnson's method was to prove each sense with a quotation from a named author, which is the idea behind every reference list. For a paper on him, EdCitation's free Cite a source builds references from the publisher's record, and the last sections show it at work on a 2024 article about the Dictionary.
What was Samuel Johnson's Dictionary?
A commissioned, single-author dictionary of English, paid for by booksellers and published in 1755. Its full title promised words "deduced from their originals" and "illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers", followed by a history of the language and a grammar (Dr Johnson's House, n.d.). Each page was nearly 18 inches tall, and the set sold for £4 10s.
Who paid for it
Boswell names the booksellers who signed the contract: Robert Dodsley, Charles Hitch, Andrew Millar, two Longmans and two Knaptons, for a price of £1,575 (Boswell, 1791/2006). Dr Johnson's House (n.d.) puts the same sum as 1,500 guineas, dates the signing to the morning of 18 June 1746, and names the other party as "William Strahan and associates". The two accounts name different lead partners; we could not read the contract itself, so we give both.
The fee covered the work, not the sales. Johnson paid his helpers and his paper out of it, and Boswell records him saying he was sorry not to have been paid more, "But it was very well." No royalties followed (Dr Johnson's House, n.d.).
Who helped: the six amanuenses
Six copyists, five of them Scots. Boswell lists two brothers named Macbean, Mr Shiels, Mr Stewart (son of an Edinburgh bookseller), Mr Maitland, and Mr Peyton, who taught French (Boswell, 1791/2006). They worked in an upper room fitted out "like a counting-house", first in Holborn and then at 17 Gough Square, the only one of Johnson's many London homes still standing (Dr Johnson's House, n.d.).
How long did it take Johnson to write his dictionary?
Between eight and nine years, depending on which date you start from. From the June 1746 contract to 1755, Dr Johnson's House (n.d.) says nine; the British Library (n.d.-a) says "just over eight"; and Lynch (2024) says "a bit more than eight". We could not confirm the exact day of publication from a source we read.
Johnson had expected three. Boswell records his friend William Adams objecting that the French Academy's forty members had taken forty years over their dictionary, and Johnson answering with a sum: forty times forty is sixteen hundred, "As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman" (Boswell, 1791/2006). The joke's French figures are Adams's; the British Library (n.d.-a) gives the French dictionary 55 years and 40 scholars instead. Boswell himself thought Johnson's imagination had "deceived him" about the three years.
How did Johnson build a definition from quotations?
By reading first and defining second. Johnson marked passages in his books with a black-lead pencil; his copyists wrote them out, and he then supplied the etymology, definitions and senses for each word (Boswell, 1791/2006). Dr Johnson's House (n.d.) describes the copied sentences going onto individual slips that were then put in alphabetical order, and quotes Sir John Hawkins on the borrowed books, which came back, if at all, "so defaced as to be scarce worth owning".
The quotations were evidence, but not always exact evidence. The British Library (n.d.-a) says that when a passage did not fit, Johnson would "chop, twist around, or rewrite" a few words. And he named his sources unevenly: in the 1755 entries we read, a quotation is signed "Shakespeare", "Locke" or "Swift" with no work, while others give a title and place, such as "Hooker, b. ii. s. 1." or "Addison's Guardian, No. 105" (Johnson, 1755/n.d.). A century later the OED's readers were told to give an exact reference for every slip, as our history of the OED's volunteers explains.
The numbers, and where they disagree
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Entries | 42,773 | Dr Johnson's House (n.d.); Crystal (n.d.) |
| Words listed | 40,000 | British Library (n.d.-a) |
| Definitions | 140,871 | Crystal (n.d.) |
| Quotations | About 114,000 (or "over 114,000") | Dr Johnson's House (n.d.); British Library (n.d.-a) |
| Longest entry | take, 134 uses over 11 columns | Crystal (n.d.) |
| Helpers | Six amanuenses | Boswell (1791/2006) |
The 40,000 looks like a round figure and the 42,773 a count; neither source says how it counted.
What are Johnson's most famous definitions?
Six entries carry the Dictionary's reputation, and each is short enough to quote. We read every one in the 1755 first folio as transcribed by Johnson's Dictionary Online, which bases its text on the edition recorded as ESTC T117231 (Johnson, 1755/n.d.).
| Word | Johnson's definition, 1755 (shortened) | Where we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Oats | "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." | 1st folio, entry oats, n.s., johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/oats_ns |
| Lexicographer | "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge" | 1st folio, entry lexicographer, n.s., /1755/lexicographer_ns |
| Patron | "Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery." (sense 1) | 1st folio, entry patron, n.s., /1755/patron_ns |
| Network | "Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." | 1st folio, entry network, n.s., /1755/network_ns |
| Excise | "A hateful tax levied upon commodities" | 1st folio, entry excise, n.s., /1755/excise_ns |
| Pension | "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country" | 1st folio, entry pension, n.s., /1755/pension_ns |
| A reference to any of them | Built from a record, not typed from memory | EdCitation's Cite a source, shown below |
Oats: a joke or a jab?
The sources disagree about the intent. Crystal (n.d.) calls the definition "almost certainly" an in-joke, a friendly dig at the five Scottish amanuenses. Boswell, though, records Johnson in 1783 saying "by my definition of OATS I meant to vex them" (Boswell, 1791/2006). The popular comeback, that Scotland is known for its fine horses and fine men, appears in none of the sources we read, including the abridged Life we searched, and we could not trace who first said it, so treat it as unconfirmed.
Lexicographer, patron and network
The lexicographer entry continues: one who "busies himself in tracing the original" of words. Its only quotation, from Watts, is about commentators on scripture. Crystal (n.d.) notes that lexicographers still delight in the description.
Patron is best read beside Johnson's letter of 7 February 1755 to Lord Chesterfield, to whom the 1747 Plan had been addressed. Johnson wrote that he had waited seven years without "one smile of favour", and asked whether a patron is one who, once a drowning man has reached ground, "encumbers him with help" (Boswell, 1791/2006).
Network is the stock example of a hard definition. Boswell defended it, and Crystal (n.d.) counts only a couple of dozen such definitions, which were less obscure to readers of the 1750s than to us. Boswell also records the best-known admission of error: asked why he had defined pastern as a horse's knee, Johnson replied "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance."
How many definitions were opinions?
Fewer than twenty, by Crystal's estimate, out of 140,871 definitions (Crystal, n.d.). Boswell listed Tory, Whig, pension, oats and excise as "capricious and humorous indulgence", and recorded one that never reached print: Johnson added "Sometimes we say a GOWER" to renegado, and the printer struck it out (Boswell, 1791/2006).
Was Johnson's the first English dictionary?
No. Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of 1604 was the first single-language English dictionary, a list of hard words with short explanations (British Library, n.d.-b). The British Library puts it at about 3,000 words; Lynch (2024) counts 2,500 headwords.
Lynch (2024) calls the "first English dictionary" claim a legend and, following Robin Alston's definition of a general dictionary, lists nineteen such titles before 1755, from Cawdrey through Bullokar (1616), Cockeram (1623) and Blount (1656) to Nathan Bailey (1721 and 1730) and John Wesley (1753). The list runs from Cawdrey's 2,500 headwords to Bailey's 60,000, so Johnson's was not even the biggest by headword.
What was new was the evidence. Johnson's was the first monolingual English dictionary to use quotations to support and illustrate its definitions (Brewer, 2025), and Crystal (n.d.) calls entries on the scale of take "unprecedented". The OED's first editors borrowed from it heavily, a story told in a short history of English.
What does Johnson's Dictionary teach about citing sources?
That a claim about language, like any claim, should rest on evidence a reader can find. Every sense in the Dictionary is backed by a sentence from a named author; a reference list offers a reader the same bargain. Three lessons follow for a student's paper:
- Name the source precisely. "Locke" tells a reader who, not where; give the work, the edition and the page or entry, as the tables in this guide do.
- Quote exactly. Johnson trimmed and reworded quotations to fit (British Library, n.d.-a). A paper cannot: mark any cut with an ellipsis, and see when to quote, paraphrase or summarise.
- Check the reference is real before you hand it in. Paste the list into EdCitation's free Verify references: each entry is matched to a record, a retraction is flagged, and an entry it cannot reach is reported as "could not check", never as "not found".
How do you cite Johnson's Dictionary and the scholarship on it?
Cite the article or book you read from its record, and cite the Dictionary itself as an entry in the edition you consulted. Here are both.
A modern article about the Dictionary
We gave Jack Lynch's 2024 article in LEA, a Firenze University Press journal, to EdCitation's Cite a source by its DOI on 27 September 2026. It came back from Crossref, not retracted, and in APA 7 read:
Lynch, J. (2024). Johnson’s dictionary and “the lexicons of ancient tongues.” LEA – Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, 13, 27–38. https://doi.org/10.36253/LEA-1824-484x-15825
APA's sentence case lowered "Dictionary", but here it is the name of Johnson's book, so we restore the capital: Johnson's Dictionary. The in-text citation is (Lynch, 2024). In MLA 9 it came back as:
Lynch, Jack. “Johnson’s Dictionary and ‘the Lexicons of Ancient Tongues.’” LEA – Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, vol. 13, Dec. 2024, pp. 27–38, https://doi.org/10.36253/LEA-1824-484x-15825.
MLA keeps the article's own capitals, so nothing needs changing there. The same run gave Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver.
An entry in the digitised 1755 edition
Neither APA nor MLA has an example for a digitised eighteenth-century dictionary, so what follows is ours, built from each style's nearest rules. APA treats an online dictionary entry as undated, with a retrieval date, because entries change (American Psychological Association, 2020), and adds "(Original work published …)" to a republished work, cited in the text as original year slash republication year (Becker, 2021). Combined, and marked as our adaptation:
Johnson, S. (n.d.). Oats. In A dictionary of the English language (1st folio ed.). Johnson's Dictionary Online. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/oats_ns (Original work published 1755)
In the text: (Johnson, 1755/n.d.). MLA puts the headword in quotation marks as the title, the dictionary in italics and the URL as the location (Modern Language Association, 2016). Our MLA 9 version, with the site as a second container:
“Oats, N.S.” A Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson, 1755. Johnson's Dictionary Online, johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/oats_ns. Accessed 27 Sept. 2026.
The site's own "Cite Selected Word" button gives a plainer form and says to vary it for your style. It holds both the 1755 and the 1773 folios, so name the one you read.
Where can you research Johnson's Dictionary?
Start from the scholars, not the anecdotes, and take every reference from a record. For that job EdCitation is the tool to use: it takes each reference from the publisher's record rather than composing it, a guarantee no chatbot offers. The comeback about Scotland's horses shows the risk of the alternative, since it travels everywhere and leads nowhere, whereas a DOI leads straight back to the article.
- Search with EdCitation's Find sources, free and without an account. It spans about 300 million published works and can be narrowed to articles or books, a range of years, or open access only. Our query "Samuel Johnson Dictionary illustrative quotations", run on 27 September 2026, found 869 works, among them Allen Reddick's 2010 paper in the International Journal of Lexicography and Penny Silva's "Johnson and the OED" (2005).
- Gather the books, Boswell's Life and the studies of the Dictionary, in the Library. Its catalogue sorts by discipline, kind, language and year, and a free account keeps what you pick in My Books; Max ($24 a month, see pricing) adds more than 5 million books to read in full or borrow.
- Reference each source in Cite a source, which is free: paste a DOI, ISBN, PubMed ID, title or web address, choose among its six styles, and every source is screened for retraction as the entry is built.
- Test the finished list in Verify references, where each entry comes back verified, "check this" or not found.
EdCitation never writes any part of your paper: the reading, the argument and the words stay yours, and every reference comes from a record, much as every sense in Johnson's Dictionary came from a book he had read.
Quick questions
What was the first English dictionary?
Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of 1604, a list of about 3,000 hard words, was the first single-language English dictionary. Lynch (2024) counts nineteen general English dictionaries before Johnson's of 1755.
How did Johnson define oats?
As "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people", in the 1755 first edition. Boswell records Johnson admitting in 1783 that he meant it to vex the Scots.
Where does "a harmless drudge" come from?
From Johnson's 1755 definition of lexicographer: "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge", who traces the origins and meanings of words.
How long did it take Johnson to write his dictionary?
Between eight and nine years: the contract was signed in June 1746 and the Dictionary was published in 1755. Johnson had promised it in three.
How do I cite Johnson's Dictionary in APA 7?
Cite the entry in the edition you read, with n.d., a retrieval date, the link and "(Original work published 1755)", as shown above. For articles about it, paste the DOI into EdCitation's free Cite a source.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2020). Dictionary entry references. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/dictionary-entry-references
- Becker, D. (2021, April 5). Citing classical and religious works. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/citing-classical-religious-works
- Boswell, J. (2006). Boswell's Life of Johnson (C. G. Osgood, Ed.; abridged ed.). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1564 (Original work published 1791)
- Brewer, C. (2025, August 6). Johnson's dictionary (1755). Examining the OED. https://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/historical-background/johnson/
- British Library. (n.d.-a). 1755 – Johnson's dictionary. Archived May 30, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200530145046/https://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/johnson/1755johnsonsdictionary.html
- British Library. (n.d.-b). Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall [English timeline]. Archived October 24, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201024183302/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126647.html
- Crystal, D. (n.d.). Johnson's Dictionary: Myths and realities [Author's typescript]. https://www.davidcrystal.com/Files/BooksAndArticles/-5385.pdf
- Dr Johnson's House. (n.d.). Johnson's Dictionary. https://www.drjohnsonshouse.org/johnsons-dictionary
- Johnson, S. (n.d.). A dictionary of the English language (1st folio ed.). Johnson's Dictionary Online. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/ (Original work published 1755)
- Lynch, J. (2024). Johnson's Dictionary and "the lexicons of ancient tongues." LEA – Lingue e Letterature d'Oriente e d'Occidente, 13, 27–38. https://doi.org/10.36253/LEA-1824-484x-15825
- Modern Language Association. (2016, June 23). When citing a print dictionary in MLA style, do I include a page number? MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/when-citing-a-print-dictionary-in-mla-style-do-i-include-a-page-number/