Frequently Asked Questions

From the front page you can type a term to search, choose to view printed pages, or find a random word. Please see our guide to searching for more details.

Good question! Please see our page on how to cite.

The full-page image scans, aka “facsimile images,” were produced by the University of Florida’s Digital Support Services Team at the George A. Smathers Libraries. We’re using these scans as our copy-text:

1755 (1st folio) edition: ESTC T117231,  UF shelfmark 423.2 J69d 1755, folio

1773 (4th folio) edition: ESTC T117232,  UF shelfmark PE1620 .J6 1773 Folio

We’re creating the entry images ourselves.

To prepare our transcriptions, we’ve also used full-page image scans from the Warren N. and Suzanne B. Cordell Collection of Dictionaries at Indiana State University. Two pages of the 1773 edition (Needlessly – Nep) are represented by scans from ISU because those pages were missing from the UF copy.

At least 41,712 words.

Why “at least”? Because it isn’t always clear what Johnson considered to be a unique word.

The very first entry in the dictionary, for A, illustrates this problem. Johnson writes fourteen paragraphs of explanation for A, some of which describe different parts of speech and different meanings. Here are three such paragraphs:

Did he consider these to be different senses of the same word, or different words with the same spelling?

Counting Headwords

We could try to answer the “how many words” question based on capitalization and location: if a word is written in all capital letters, and if it is outdented from the column of text, then it’s a headword that Johnson is defining.

Unfortunately, the Dictionary’s formatting isn’t consistent enough for us to be confident of this definition. For example, Johnson capitalizes hip-hop and gives it a separate definition, but the word is also numbered as though it’s just one of the senses of To Hip.

By contrast, the entry for To Quinch says “This word seems to be the same with queech, winch, and queck“; of these three synonyms, queech does not have its own entry in the dictionary – in fact, this is the only place queech occurs in the entire Dictionary–but it isn’t capitalized or outdented here. Should we count queech as a word that Johnson defined?

And then there are entries that list what are obviously forms of another word, such as kept. The word kept is the same word as To keep . . . isn’t it? Johnson doesn’t provide a separate definition for kept, possibly because he provides three separate entries for keep (and one of them, keep, v.a., lists 40 different senses). Should we subtract kept from the count, even though it is outdented and in all-caps?

Finally, Johnson often links multiple words to the same definition. For example, did he consider necerchief to be a unique word or just a different spelling of neckatee?

It’s no wonder that different people have arrived at different answers to the question of “How many words did Johnson define in his dictionary?”

Counting Entry Files

Given all of these conundrums, how did we arrive at our answer, “at least 41,712 words”?

We counted our entry files. For the infrastructure of the Johnson’s Dictionary website, we created a separate computer file for every identifiable entry, defining entry as “the chunk of text headed by at least one outdented all-capitalized word.”

All of the examples above are contained in single files: all fourteen paragraphs about A are contained in a single file, the words to hip and hip-hop are contained in a single file, the words necerchief and neckatee are in a single file, etc. Because we have 41,712 such entry files, we know Johnson defined at least 41,712 words.

If you decide to count the words yourself, let us know how many you find!

The first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary was issued in two substantial folio-sized volumes. Each volume contained about 1,150 pages, each page about 18 inches tall and 10 inches wide. The Dictionary defined nearly 43,000 words, plus it included three introductory essays: Preface, The History of the English Language, and A Grammar of the English Tongue. The whole thing weighed more than 20 pounds, making it similar in size and weight to a sewing machine, a large turkey, a stack of four 4×8” landscape pavers, a temporary “donut” spare tire.

Johnson himself declared the book “Vasta mole superbus” (“Proud in its great bulk”)

The Latin poem on the title page is from Horace’s Epistles, where Horace is addressing those who want to write poetry that will be considered great. Here is a translation by Andrew Wood (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1872):

Paul Luna describes the Dictionary’s typography in his essay “The typographic design of Johnson’s Dictionary” (Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s Dictionary, edited by Jack Lynch and Anne McDermott, Cambridge University Press, 2005):

“In type design, the faces cut by William Caslon in the 1720s and 1730s provided a systematic (though not wholly uniform) set of related roman, italic, and small-cap founts in a full range of sizes. […] Johnson’s printer, William Strahan, bought his types from the Scottish typefounder Alexander Wilson, who offered faces ‘conformable to the London types,’ in other words close in design to those of Caslon.” (p. 179)

Johnson’s Dictionary has remained in print in some form since it was first published in 1755. J.D. Fleeman’s magisterial reference work, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Treating His Published Works from the Beginnings to 1984 (Clarendon Press, 2000), devotes 245 pages to listing various editions, re-issues, abridgements, and adaptations of Johnson’s Dictionary. These include 60 editions based on the original folio, three facsimile editions, 127 abridged editions, 47 adaptations and translations, and 316 “miniature” editions. Additional editions have been published since 1984, including a CD-ROM edition and two abridgments for popular audiences.

The miniature editions, in particular, represent at most 75% of such volumes, Fleeman notes. Although they have no authoritative relationship with the Dictionary proper—they generally contain lists of words explained by 1-2 synonyms—they illustrate Johnson’s popular reputation as a lexicographer.

Of the numerous editions of Johnson’s Dictionary, the 1st folio edition [1755] has been the most accessible and has received the most scholarly attention. The 2nd folio (1755-56) edition arrived on the heels of the first, sold in affordable weekly numbers to appeal to a wider range of readers. Johnson revised the “Preface” to that edition, but probably not the wordlist. The 3rd edition (1765) was essentially a reprint of the 2nd; its few revisions were designed to help it function as a glossary to Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare, with which it was published to coincide. However, the 4th edition [1773], the last edition published with Johnson’s participation, was extensively revised by the author, with new headwords, new senses, and new quotations (perhaps as many as 16,000 changes.) This edition was so thoroughly revised that any project of this kind would be incomplete without it.

For more about Johnson’s work on different editions, see Allen Reddick’s The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary 1746-1773 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

The best estimate we have found comes from Johnson bibliographer J.D. Fleeman, who writes, “It would not be unreasonable to suggest that probably half the 2,000 copies of Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) may still be extant, though tracking down all the survivors would be a major task.”* Many of the survivors are no doubt held in private collections. Fleeman didn’t attempt a census, and we won’t either: alas, we don’t have the resources to travel the globe and examine copies in person.

We do have the resources to locate copies in libraries and similar institutions, however, and that’s where we started. This page contains a list of the nearly 500 copies we have located so far.

To create the list, we compiled results from both WorldCat and the English Short Title Catalog. As we learned of other copies, we added their holding institutions to the list. Then we confirmed each library’s holdings, either by checking the library’s own online catalog, or by contacting the library directly, or both.

Where a fractional copy is listed (e.g., 0.5), that library has one volume from the first edition, often supplemented by a volume from another edition.

If you see something on our list that needs revision–especially if you know of copies we have yet to locate–please let us know!

*From p. xxxvi of A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Treating his published works from the beginnings to 1984. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Later in the same volume, Fleeman writes, “The book has long been a collector’s item, but despite the generally high price copies are not rare. . . . It is likely that more than half of the original edn. of 2,000 copies has survived.”