With much
antecedent preparation, with much skilled co-operation, and with
strenuous effort, it took more than nine years to produce the first
three letters of the alphabet of the Oxford New English Dictionary.
Johnson's great work raised English lexicography altogether to a
higher level. In his hands it became a department of literature. The
value of the Dictionary was recognized from the first by men of
letters; a second edition was called for the same year. But it hardly
became a popular work, or even a work of popular fame, before the
present century. For forty years after its first publication editions
of Bailey followed each other as rapidly as ever; numerous new
dictionaries of the size and character of Bailey, often largely
indebted to Johnson's definitions, appeared. But the only new feature
introduced into lexicography between 1755 and the end of the century
was the indication of the Orthoepy or Pronunciation. From Bailey
onward, and by Johnson himself, the place of the stress-accent had
been marked, but no attempt had been made to show how such a group of
letters, for example, as _colonel_, or _enough_, or _phthisical_, was
actually pronounced; or, to use modern phraseology, to tell what the
_living word_ itself was, as distinguished from its written symbol.
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