ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century was a time of great creativity and development for the English language, with its vocabulary expanding in a particularly dramatic way. The chapter records how, as the seventeenth century started, people felt it was time to curb the extravagant growth, to allow the heat to cool a little and to impose some systematisation on the language. It describes how the eighteenth century managed this. In an age with a strong sense of order, coupled with an enthusiasm for codifying and classifying, this chapter’s landmark figure - Samuel Johnson - did much to codify and classify parts of the language. The focus is on his Dictionary and how he went about producing it.
