by Two and a half centuries ago this year, the first comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language was published. The lexicographer (def. “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge”) was Dr. Samuel Johnson, better known then as an essayist and moralist, and (as is more obvious now than then) a serious Christian in a deistic, even skeptical age. Nine years earlier, a bookseller named Robert Dodsley asked the 36-year-old Johnson about compiling a dictionary. Dodsley considered it a rebuke to national pride that England lacked anything to equal the great dictionaries of France and Italy, each the product of teams of academics. At first Johnson declined,