More than 100 years had now elapsed since Robert Cawdrey prepared his ‘Table Alphabeticall,’ and nearly a century since the work of Cockeram; and all the dictionaries which had meanwhile appeared, although their size had steadily increased, were, in purpose and fact, only what these works had been—­Vocabularies of ‘Hard Words,’ not of words in general.  The notion that an English Dictionary ought to contain all English words had apparently as yet occurred to no one; at least no one had proposed to carry the idea into practice.  But this further step in the evolution of the modern dictionary was now about to be made, and the man who made it was one of the most deserving in the annals of English lexicography.  We now, looking back on the eighteenth century, associate it chiefly with the work of Dr. Johnson; but down beyond the middle of that century, and to the man in the street much later, by far the best-known name in connexion with dictionaries was that of NATHANAEL BAILEY.  An advertisement appended to the first edition of his Dictionary runs thus:  ’Youth Boarded, and taught the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages, in a Method more Easy and Expedient than is common; also, other School-learning, by the Author of this Dictionary, to be heard of at Mr. Batley’s, Bookseller, at the Sign of the Dove in Paternoster Row.’  Bailey was the author or editor of several scholarly works; but, for us, his great work was his Universal Etymological English Dictionary, published in 1721.  In this he aimed at including all English words; yet not for the mere boast of ‘completeness,’ but for a practical purpose.  The dictionary was not merely explanatory, it was also etymological; and though Englishmen might not need to be told the meaning of man or woman, dog or cat[10], they might want a hint as to their derivation.  Bailey had hit the nail aright:  successive editions were called for almost every two years during the century; when the author died, in 1742, the tenth edition was in the press.  In that of 1731, Bailey first marked the stress-accent, a step in the direction of indicating pronunciation.  In 1730, moreover, he brought out with the aid of some specialists, his folio dictionary, the greatest lexicographical work yet undertaken in English, into which he also introduced diagrams and proverbs.  This is an interesting book historically, for, according to Sir John Hawkins, it formed the working basis of Dr. Johnson[11].

Bailey had many imitators and rivals, nearly all of whom aimed, like him, at including all words; of these I need only name Dyche and Pardon 1735, B.N.  Defoe 1735, and Benjamin Martin 1749.