Which dictionary by Samuel Johnson was first published in 1755?

Which dictionary by Samuel Johnson was first published in 1755? It was A Dictionary of the English Language.

Often called Johnson’s Dictionary, the work was published on 15 April 1755. London booksellers commissioned Samuel Johnson in 1746 because existing English dictionaries were considered inconsistent and incomplete. Johnson estimated that the project would take three years, but it required roughly seven.

Johnson worked largely at 17 Gough Square in London, reading extensively and marking illustrative quotations. The first edition contained about 42,773 headwords and approximately 114,000 literary quotations. Its large two-volume folio format made it expensive and physically imposing.

The dictionary was highly influential, but it was not the first English dictionary and it did not permanently fix every spelling or meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary, begun more than a century later and completed in its first edition in 1928, used a broader historical method. Roget’s Thesaurus is a different kind of reference work, organized by related meanings rather than alphabetic definitions.