It is remarkable that Richardson’s dictionary, perhaps through certain defects in his method, did not at once attract the attention it deserved. The Oxford English Dictionary Book PDF Free Download Excerpt From The Book If there is any truth in the old Greek maxim that a large book is a great evil, English dictionaries have been steadily growing worse ever since their inception more than three centuries ago. When all this was superadded the principle of historical illustration, introduced by Richardson, it became inevitable that any adequate dictionary of English must be one of the larger books of the world. The next stage is marked by Johnson’s systematic use of quotations to illustrate and justify the definitions, the many omissions still existing in the vocabulary being partly filled by later supplementary works on the same lines. The principle of general inclusion was practically accepted by Kersey and Bailey. The widening of this arrow range during the seventeenth century is made obvious by the steady increase in size through Ballokar, Cockeram, Blount, and Phillips until the eighteenth. The earlier dictionary makers followed in the line of the old glossaries and directed their attention to such words as were likely to be unfamiliar to the ordinary man.
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