PREFACE

j[T is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil,than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to bedisgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, anddiligence without reward.

Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not asthe pupil, but the.slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clearobstructions from the paths through which Learning and Genius press forward to conquest and glory,without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author mayaspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompensehas been yet granted to very few.

I have, notwithstanding this discouragement, attempted a Dictionary of the English language, which,while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, lias itself been hitherto neglected ;suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance; resigned to the tyranny of timeand fashion ; and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.

When 1 took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, andenergetick without rules : wherever I turned my view there was perplexity to be disentangled, and con-fusion to be regulated ; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principleof selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expressionto be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledgedauthority.

Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar, I applied myself to the perusal of ourwriters; and noting whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulatedin time the materials of a dictionary, which, by degrees, I reduced to method, establishing to myself, inthe progress of the work, such rules as experience and analogy suggested to me ; experience, whichpractice and observation were continually increasing; and analogy, which, though in some wordsobscure, was evident in others.

In adjusting the Orthography , which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found itnecessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it,from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced. Every language has itsanomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated amongthe imperfections of human things, and which required only to be .registered, that they may not beincreased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded : but every language has likewise itsimproprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.'

As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken beforethey were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with greatdiversity, as we now observe those who cannot read to catch sounds imperfectly, and utter them negli-gently. When this wild and barbarous jargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endea-voured to express, as he could, the sounds which he was accustomed to pronounce or to receive, andvitiated in writing such words as were already vitiated in speech. The powers of the letters, when theyW'ere applied to a new language, must have been vague and unsettled, and therefore different hands wouldexhibit the same sound by different combinations.