[10] His explanations of such words were curt enough: ‘Cat, a Creature well known’; ‘Horse, a Beast well known’; ‘Man, a Creature endued with Reason.’
[11] ‘An interleaved copy of Bailey's dictionary in folio he made the repository of the several articles.’ Works of J., 1787, I. 175.
[12] Pg. coco, a grinning mask, applied to the coco-nut because of the three holes and central protuberance at its apex, suggesting two eyes, a mouth, and nose.
[13] The following are examples of his own practice: The Rambler (1751), No. 153, par. 3, ‘I was in my eighteenth year dispatched to the university.’ Ibid., No. 161, par. 4, ‘I ... soon dispatched a bargain on the usual terms.’ Letter to Mrs. Thrale, May 6, 1776, ‘We dispatched our journey very peaceably.’
[14] Among such must be reckoned the treatment of words in the explanation of which Johnson showed political or personal animus or whimsical humour, as in the well-known cases of whig, tory, excise, pension, pensioner, oats, Grub-street, lexicographer (see Boswell's Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, i. 294); although it must be admitted that these have come to be among the famous spots of the Dictionary, and have given gentle amusement to thousands, to whom it has been a delight to see ‘human nature’ too strong for lexicographic decorum.
[15] In some cases, long Lists of the Authors, from whose works ‘the illustrative quotations have been selected,’ are given, without the statement that many of those quotations have not actually been selected from the authors and works named, but have merely been annexed from Johnson or one of his supplementers.
[16] The famous Deutsches Wörterbuch of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, after many years of preparation, began to be printed in 1852; Jacob Grimm himself died in 1863, in the middle of the letter F; the work is expected to reach the end of S by the close of the century. The great Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was commenced in 1852; its first volume, A–Ajuin, was published in 1882, and it is not yet quite half-finished. Of the new edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca, which is to a certain extent on historical principles, Vol. I, containing A, was published in 1863, and Vol. VIII, completing I, in 1899; at least twenty-five more years will be required to reach Z. None of these works embraces so long a period of the language, or is so strictly historical in method, as the New English Dictionary. Rather are they, like Littré's great Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, Dictionaries of the modern language, with the current words more or less historically treated.