文档介绍：Johnson's Dictionary
For the century before Johnson's Dictionary was published in 1775. there had been concern about the state of the English was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution.
There had, of course, been dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some 120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray, published in 1604 under the title A Table Alphabetical! 'of hard usuall English wordes'. Like the various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century, Cawdra/s tended to concentrate on 'scholarly* words; one function of the dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine learning.
Beyond the practical need to make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and circumscribe the various worlds to conquer - lexical as well as social and commercial. It is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model of an eighteenth-century literary man. as famous in his own time as in ours, should have published his Dictionary at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class.
Johnson was a poet and critic who raised common sense to the heights of genius. His approach to the problems