Books had been regarded with something approaching…
1746 CE
The rise of literacy among the general public, combined with the technical advances in the mechanics of printing and bookbinding, means that for the first time, books, texts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers are widely available to the general public at a reasonable cost.
Such an explosion of the printed word demands a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling for those words.
This could be achieved by means of an authoritative dictionary of the English language.
Over the previous hundred and fifty years more than twenty dictionaries have been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.
The problem with these dictionaries is that they tend to be little more than poorly organized and poorly researched glossaries of "hard words": words that were technical, foreign, obscure or antiquated, but no dictionary has comprehensively documented the English lexicon.
In 1746, a consortium of London's most successful printers, including Robert Dowdsley and Thomas Longham—none can afford to undertake it alone—sets out to satisfy and capitalize on this need by the ever increasing reading and writing public.
The consortium contracts Samuel Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of fifteen hundred guineas guineas (fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds), equivalent to about two hundred and twenty thousand pounds in in 2017.
Johnson claims he can finish the work in three years, but it will take nearly nine years to complete it.
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