Defining the World

“[A] marvelous account” of Johnson’s towering achievement, nearly a decade of labor and linguistic fact-finding, presented by “a buoyant, zestful writer” ( The  Boston Globe ). By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret of his London home to the creation of hi