How this Site Came to Be

In May 2019, Dr. Beth Rapp Young at the University of Central Florida received an NEH grant to create this resource. Currently, the core project team includes Young, William Dorner, Amy Larner Giroux, Connie Harper, Brook Miller, and Abigail Moreshead. We have been joined through the years by hundreds of students and volunteers from around the world—their names are on the Community page.

Two libraries have scanned images of the printed dictionaries for us: the Warren N. and Suzanne B. Cordell Collection of Dictionaries at Indiana State University, and the Digital Support Services Team at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries. A transcribed, XML-encoded text of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 folio edition was licensed to our project under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) by Ian Lancashire, editor, Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), the University of Toronto.

Prior to our project, this URL was the home of a crowd-sourced edition of Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, created by Brandi Besalke. Her account of this earlier dictionary can be read here.