Johnson’s great work raised English lexicography altogether to a higher level.  In his hands it became a department of literature.  The value of the Dictionary was recognized from the first by men of letters; a second edition was called for the same year.  But it hardly became a popular work, or even a work of popular fame, before the present century.  For forty years after its first publication editions of Bailey followed each other as rapidly as ever; numerous new dictionaries of the size and character of Bailey, often largely indebted to Johnson’s definitions, appeared.  But the only new feature introduced into lexicography between 1755 and the end of the century was the indication of the Orthoepy or Pronunciation.  From Bailey onward, and by Johnson himself, the place of the stress-accent had been marked, but no attempt had been made to show how such a group of letters, for example, as colonel, or enough, or phthisical, was actually pronounced; or, to use modern phraseology, to tell what the living word itself was, as distinguished from its written symbol.  This feature, so obviously important in a language of which the spelling had ceased to be phonetic, was added by Dr. William Kenrick in his ‘New Dictionary’ of 1773, a little later in 1775 by William Perry, in 1780 by Thomas Sheridan, and especially in 1791 by John Walker, whose authority long remained as supreme in the domain of pronunciation, as that of Dr. Johnson in definition and illustration; so that popular dictionaries of the first half of the present century commonly claimed to be abridgements of ’Johnson’s Dictionary, with, the Pronunciation on the basis of Walker.’

From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the lexicographical supremacy of Johnson’s Dictionary was undisputed, and eminent students of the language busied themselves in trying, not to supersede it, but to supplement and perfect it.  Numerous supplements, containing additional words, senses, and quotations, were published; in 1818 a new edition, embracing many such accessions, was prepared by the learned Archdeacon Todd, and ‘Todd’s Johnson’ continues to be an esteemed work to our own day.  But only two independent contributions to the development of lexicography were made in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.  These were the American work of Noah Webster, and the English work of Dr. Charles Richardson.

Webster was a great man, a born definer of words; he was fired with the idea that America ought to have a dictionary of its own form of English, independent of British usage, and he produced a work of great originality and value.  Unfortunately, like many other clever men, he had the notion that derivations can be elaborated from one’s own consciousness as well as definitions, and he included in his work so-called ‘etymologies’ of this sort.  But Etymology is simply Word-history, and Word-history, like all other history, is a record of the facts which did happen, not a fabric of conjectures as to what may have happened.  In the later editions of Webster, these ‘derivations’ have been cleared out en masse, and the etymology placed in the hands of men abreast of the science of the time; and the last edition of Webster, the International, is perhaps the best of one-volume dictionaries.