To Londoners who happened to spot the notice in the Daily Advertiser one day in 1747, it must have seemed less an announcement than a boast: "There is now preparing for the press, and in great forwardness, in two volumes in folio, an English dictionary; etymological, analogical, syntactical, explanatory, and critical." Who could have undertaken such a gargantuan task? In 1755. when the two volumes came out, the world became aware that Samuel Johnson would forever be famous as Dictionary Johnson.
In its own day, few books caused a bigger stir than the Dictionary....
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