Kamui Allohara

21Eng19

Dictionaries- Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the Collin Cobuild

Dictionary

Samuel Johnson- A dictionary of the English Language

Background:
The political and the social context of Johnson’s dictionary begins with the rise of literacy
among the general public. There was an influx of innovations because of the technological
advances through printing and bookbinding. The bloom in technology ushered the availability
of books, newspapers, texts and maps for the general public for the first time. This also
resulted in the big demand in the need for a dictionary to let the public explore and implore
the various words and terminologies encountered by this surge or rather, an overflow of
reading material.
Johnson’s dictionary was not the first effort made in lexicography. Over the course of 150
years before Johnson, more than twenty dictionaries had already been published. However,
none of them had a proper order and an organised structure in the arrangement of the words.
The dictionaries are also criticized for a lack of research in addressing and define foreign,
obscure, technical or simply put, “hard words”. This was to completely change with “A
dictionary of the English Language” in the sense that the lexicographer was the first to
adequately and comprehensively capture the English lexicon.
So, how did he prepare his dictionary?
It took Johnson around nine years spanning from 1746-1755 to prepare his dictionary. By
1747, he had already jotted and penned down his plan which explained his intentions and
methodology for preparing the dictionary. He received the patronage of the fourth earl of
Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope. The patron was a strong propagator of a need for a structured
documentation that the dictionary will serve. However, his propaganda in promoting the same
was not well received by Johnson. His displeasure was expressed in the form of a letter as
well as the very dictionary that he created.
The dictionary:
Johnson’s dictionary can be defined as large and bulky, something the lexicographer would
find his pride in. The paper was printed in the best quality available at the time and as such,
the production cost of a single book ran up to £1,600. The first edition of the dictionary had a
detailed and compiled list of 42,773 words. What set apart Johnson’s, dictionary to the rest
were the illustrations of the meanings of the words through referential words of literary
quotations that used Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden as the most frequent citations. Johnson
even supplemented the dictionary with additional notes on the usage of a particular word thus
adding another layer to it by ‘practicalizing’ the “descriptions” already given in the book.
Johnson also added “humour’, and in that, prejudice into a lot of his descriptions. One of the
examples to explain this humour and prejudice comes through the explanation of the word
‘patron’. He describes the word as “a wretch that supports with insolence and is paid with
flattery’. The description of the words is hinted to be a subtle jab towards his own patron.
While humour was an integral part of his dictionary, one can never ignore the unprecedented
meticulousness of the creation. The dictionary was composed of not only illustrations, but
various definitions to compliment its use. To sample a few, the word “turn” had around 16
different definitions and 15 illustrations in the form of literary text references. “Take”, as the
very definition of the word, takes the cake and prominence in the dictionary running over 5
pages and around 8000 words with 134 definitions.
One of the striking features of Johnson’s dictionaries is that it is in the alphabetical order of
the 18th century English alphabet. At the time, the letters “I” and “J” were considered to be
similar and more less the same. The same was the case with the letters “u” and “v”. Hence, to
a modern reader, it will be an interesting and amusing sight to locate the word “jargon”
before word “idle”.
The criticisms:
The criticism against Johnson’s dictionary primarily comes in three layers. The first surface
the etymology of the word and could be considered to be ‘lacking’ as per modern standards.
Johnson’s dictionary did not properly account for the pronunciation of the words and in that,
can be considered to be prescriptive in nature. Finally, Johnson’s dictionary can also be
considered to be “linguistically conservative” as the importance given to the traditional usage
of the words superseded that of the public usage of the words. As such, traditional spellings
were incorporated instead of modern, simpler spellings.
However, in spite of its shortcomings, Johnson’s “A dictionary of the English Language” was
by far the best dictionary at its time. The organized structure that it carried laid down the
blueprints to Webster’s Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictonary published in the same
century. As such, it can perhaps be considered as the most influential dictionary in the history
of human beings.

Collin Cobuild’s Dictionary

Background:
Collin’s publications, at its inception, has colours drawn in the realm of religion and
pedagogy. William Collins, a religious teacher, aimed at securing a position for his firm as a
legal publisher of the Bible. He acquired this permission in 1839 and gradually used this
momentum to become one of the leading publishers of the Bible, and through that, the
leading publisher of religious and pedagogical publications.
Roughly 15 years prior to this development, 1824, to be precise, marked the advent of the
Collin dictionary publications. What began as a partnership with Smith Elder, in the
publication of Donnegan’s Greek and English Lexicon, laid the seeds and slowly transpired
to the development and the creation of Collins illustrated dictionaries, published in 1840.
This dictionary went on to sell more than one million copies.
With the surge in the technological advancements with the steam presses, it barely took 20
years for Collins to start publishing dictionaries in all shapes and sizes. In 1902, Collins
publications understood the market and the need to create a dictionary that is a.) not bulky
and most importantly b.) affordable to all. They capitalized on it by launching the Gems
Pocket Dictionary.
Further advancements to this initiative were made twenty years down the line with foreign
language editions and travel and reference Gems. To date, these are one of the best selling
advancements made in the history of the Collins publications.
The Collins Cobuild Dictionary
In 1987, the Collins publication ventured into a new direction by introducing the first Cobuild
dictionary that was directed towards the learners of the English language. This dictionary
distinguished itself from the rest of the dictionaries by the amount of time and resource
invested in creating a corpus of more than 4.5 billion words that the company likes to call the
“The Bank of English”. It also accounted for the difference in the usage of every word with
evidences to back up the same.
The start of a new initiative laid down the seeds of revolution and the dawn of a new age of
dictionaries and “dictionary-making”. The onus now shifted to a more “corpus-driven”
dictionary making process.
But why did this shift happen?
The answer to that question lies in the analysis and the birth of the Corpus. Developed by
Professor John Sinclair, the electronic corpus aimed to analyze the way people actually used
language in real life. This was supplemented by the examples taken from real life
conversations. It ended up forming the biggest collection of data of the English language in
the entire world. The corpus thus started getting used as a reference for grammar, language as
well as dictionaries from the 1990s.
A corpus of a language is ever expanding. Recognizing this, the “Bank of English” as the
Collins call it keeps updating itself on a daily basis. One of the most important striking point
of the Collins Cobuild dictionary is that it integrates the vision and the pedagogical
methodologies of William Collins in its approach. As such, the dictionary is renowned not
only for its “real-life data driven” based corpus, but also pedagogical elements aimed to help
the new learner of English. This uses the approach often implemented in EFL or ESL classes
by teaching ‘phrases’ rather than mere isolated ‘words’ in chunks. Developments in the
teaching industry had led to the understanding that a speaker foreign to a language would
understand the new language more efficiently if the words and phrases were taught as per the
use of “collocations”. It didn’t take long for Collins publications to capitalize on it. They
added a new element of explaining the set of words that often go along with a particular
word. They used varied combinations through linguistic and lexicographic expertise in
creating the Collins Cobuild dictionary, as the platform accentuates the learning process of
the new learner of the English language.