The lost and found in Richardson’s A New Dictionary of the English Language (1867): an insight into the state of the vocabulary

Aware of Richardson’s ambivalent position as a lexicographer; partly dependent upon his predecessor’s Dictionary, as he himself states in the front matter of his dictionary and as was customary lexicographic practice-after all; partly looking forwards towards the OED, the aim of this research is to discover Richardson’s lexicographic attitude as far as the lexicon is concerned. If one considers that there is a gap of fifty years between the fourth edition of Johnson’s Dictionary (1773) and the first edition of Richardson’s New Dictionary (1836-37), and a one hundred year gap between Johnson’s first edition (1855) and the 1855 edition of Richardson’s work, it is plausible to imagine that the lexicon recorded in Richardson’s dictionary should vary somewhat to that recorded in Johnson’s. To test this hypothesis three main procedures were carried out. The first was to verify the actual extent of the changes in the lexicon in the fifty-year gap between the compilation of the two dictionaries. This was done by examining the OED (online) and by recording all the words with first citations dated between the years 1770 and 1820. This information would provide us with an idea of the number and quality of the neologisms arisen in the fifty-year gap. Secondly, lemmas with initials LA, NE and PI were looked up in both editions of Johnson’s Dictionary and in the 1855 edition of Richardson’s New Dictionary. The lemmas were thirdly and finally compared in the two dictionaries, taking into account the differences and similarities between the inclusion of discrete and multiword units, lexical fields, and word families.