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The first onset of the Renaissance worked against rather than in favor of the native English dictionary. The breakdown of Latin as an International language and the rapid development of international trade let to an immediate demand for foreign-language dictionaries. The first of such works was rapidly followed by the best known of all such works, Florio’s Italian-English dictionary (1599).
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The evolution of the English dictionary is rooted in the general evolution of the English language. In this development the chief pressures were exerted by the steady increase in the word stock of English. Such an overall increase as this made the dictionary necessary. The pressure of vocabulary, however, has always been influenced and reinforced by intellectual climate of each successive period of the language.
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The Dictionary of Hard Words the real predecessor of the modern dictionary was developed to provide precisely such explanations. It is significant that the first English word book to use the name dictionary, Coke ram’s The English Dictionary (1623), is subtitled An Interpreter of Hard Words. If the 16th was the century of the foreign language dictionary, the 17th was the century of the dictionary of hard words.
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The first book to embody the ideals of the age was Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, originally published in 1721. This, one of the most revolutionary dictionaries ever to appear, was the first to pay proper attention to current usage, the first to feature etymology, the first to give aid in syllabification, the first to give illustrative quotations (chiefly from verbs), the first to include illustrations, and the first to indicate pronunciation.
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Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) enormously extends the techniques developed by Bailey. Johnson was able to revise Bailey’s crude etymologies, to make a systemic use of illustrative quotations, to fix the spelling of many disputed words, to develop a really discriminating system of definition, and to exhibit the vocabulary of English much more fully than had ever been attempted before.
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The dictionaries of the second half of the 18th century extended this notion particularly to the field of pronunciation. Various pronunciations experts edited a series of pronunciations dictionaries. Of these, the most important are Thomas Sheridan’s General Dictionary of English Language (1780),
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In the 18th century, the public on both sides of the Atlantic were eager for guidance on how to speak correctly. John ‘Elocution’ Walker (1732–1807) met this demand by illustrating how to reproduce a ‘cultured’ London accent, which he described as ‘undoubtedly the best’. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) gives advice for people with Scottish or Irish accents, and above all for Londoners with a Cockney accent, which according to Walker was ‘a thousand times more offensive and disgusting’.
