It is remarkable that Richardson’s dictionary, perhaps through certain defects in his method, did not at once attract the attention it deserved. When all this was superadded the principle of historical illustration, introduced by Richardson, it became inevitable that any adequate dictionary of English must be one of the larger books of the world. The next stage is marked by Johnson’s systematic use of quotations to illustrate and justify the definitions, the many omissions still existing in the vocabulary being partly filled by later supplementary works on the same lines. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. The principle of general inclusion was practically accepted by Kersey and Bailey. Masterfully researched and eloquently written, The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionaryand literary history. The widening of this arrow range during the seventeenth century is made obvious by the steady increase in size through Ballokar, Cockeram, Blount, and Phillips until the eighteenth. The earlier dictionary makers followed in the line of the old glossaries and directed their attention to such words as were likely to be unfamiliar to the ordinary man.
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