Johnson's Dictionary
''A Dictionary of the English Language'', sometimes published as ''Johnson's Dictionary'', was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson. It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £ in . Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life. Until the completion of the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scho ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Benjamin Martin (lexicographer)
Benjamin Martin (baptized 1705; died 1782) was a lexicographer who compiled one of the early English dictionaries, the ''Lingua Britannica Reformata'' (1749). He also was a lecturer on science and maker of scientific instruments. Life Martin was born in Worplesdon, Surrey and began life as a ploughboy, but graduated to become a teacher. A legacy of £500 enabled him to buy books and instruments, and he became a lecturer and instrument maker. He was an early champion for the Newtonian system. In 1737, he published the ''Bibliotheca Technologica'' - a survey of natural philosophy in 25 sub-headings. In 1740, he moved to Fleet Street, near the Royal Society where his admired Newton would often lecture. He began manufacturing Hadley's quadrant (a predecessor to the sextant) and optical instruments, and also published a book ''A New and Compendious System of Optics'', where he introduced to English the concept of fundamental science (from New Latin scientia fundamentalis). His b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Pica (typography)
The pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to approximately of an inch, or from to of a foot. One pica is further divided into 12 points. In printing, three pica measures are used: * The French pica of 12 Didot points (also called cicero) generally is: 12 × 0.376 = . * The American pica of . It was established by the United States Type Founders' Association in 1886. In TeX one pica is of an inch. * The contemporary computer PostScript pica is exactly of an inch or of a foot, i.e. 4.2 mm or 0.1 in. Publishing applications such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress represent pica measurements with whole-number picas left of a lower-case ''p'', followed by the points number, for example: 5p6 represents 5 picas and 6 points, or 5 picas. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) defined by the World Wide Web Consortium use pc as the abbreviation for pica ( of an inch), and pt for point ( of an inch). The pica is also used in measuring the font capacity and is applied in the pro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of typefaces, thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly. The art and craft of designing typefaces is called ''type design''. Designers of typefaces are called ''type designers'' and are often employed by ''type foundry, type foundries''. In desktop publishing, type designers are sometimes also called ''font developers'' or ''font designers''. Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for character (symbol), characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase А and Greek uppercase alpha. There are typefaces tailored for special applications, s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Title Page
The title page of a book, thesis or other written work is the page at or near the front which displays its title (publishing), title, subtitle, author, publisher, and edition, often artistically decorated. (A half title, by contrast, displays only the title of a work.) The title page is one of the most important parts of the "front matter" or "preliminaries" of a book, as the data on it and its verso (together known as the "title leaf") are used to establish the "title proper and usually, though not necessarily, the statement of responsibility and the data relating to publication". This determines the way the book is cited in library catalogs and academic references. The title page often shows the title of the work, the person or body responsible for its intellectual content, and the imprint, which contains the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication. Particularly in paperback editions it may contain a shorter title than the cover or lack a descriptiv ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Special Edition
The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints, recorded music and films, and videogames, but now including clothing, cars, fine wine, and whisky, among other products. A limited edition is restricted in the number of copies produced, although in fact the number may be very low or very high. Suzuki (2008) defines limited edition products as those “sold in a state that makes them difficult to obtain because of companies limiting their availability to a certain period, quantity, region, or channel". A special edition implies there is extra material of some kind included. The term is frequently used on DVD film releases, often when the so-called "special" edition is actually the only version released. Collector's edition Collector's edition may just be another term for special edition a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl Of Chesterfield
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, (22 September 169424 March 1773) was a British statesman, diplomat, and man of letters, and an acclaimed wit of his time. Early life He was born in London to Philip Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Chesterfield, and Lady Elizabeth Savile, and known as Lord Stanhope until the death of his father, in 1726. Following the death of his mother in 1708, Stanhope was raised mainly by his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax. Educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he left just over a year into his studies, after focusing on languages and oration. He subsequently embarked on the Grand Tour of the Continent, to complete his education as a nobleman, by exposure to the cultural legacies of Classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to become acquainted with his aristocratic counterparts and the polite society of Continental Europe. In the course of his post-graduate tour of Europe, the death of Queen Anne (r. 1702–1714) and the accession of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Precedent
A precedent is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common-law legal systems place great value on deciding cases according to consistent principled rules, so that similar facts will yield similar and predictable outcomes, and observance of precedent is the mechanism by which that goal is attained. The principle by which judges are bound to precedents is known as ''stare decisis'' (a Latin phrase with the literal meaning of "to stand in the-things-that-have-been-decided"). Common-law precedent is a third kind of law, on equal footing with statutory law (that is, statutes and codes enacted by legislative bodies) and subordinate legislation (that is, regulations promulgated by executive branch agencies, in the form of delegated legislation) in UK parlance – or regulatory law (in US parlance). Case law, in common-law jurisdictions, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Henry Hitchings
Henry Hitchings (born 11 December 1974) is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. The second of his books, ''The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English'', won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. He has written two books about Samuel Johnson and has served as the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As a critic, he has mainly written about books and theatre. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK's The Critics' Circle, Critics' Circle. Life He was a King's Scholar at Eton College before going to Christ Church, Oxford, and then to University College London to research his PhD on Samuel Johnson. Books ''Dr Johnson's Dictionary'' In 2005 Hitchings published ''Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World'', a biography of Samuel Johnson's epochal ''A Dictionary of the English Language'' ( ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Nathan Bailey
Nathan Bailey (died 27 June 1742), was an English philologist and lexicographer. He was the author of several dictionaries, including his '' Universal Etymological Dictionary'', which appeared in some 30 editions between 1721 and 1802. Bailey's ''Dictionarium Britannicum'' (1730 and 1736) was the primary resource mined by Samuel Johnson for his ''Dictionary of the English Language'' (1755). Life Bailey was a Seventh Day Baptist, admitted 1691 to a congregation in Whitechapel, London. He was probably excluded from the congregation by 1718. Later he had a school at Stepney. William Thomas Whitley attributes to him a degree of LL.D. Works Bailey, with John Kersey the younger, was a pioneer of English lexicography, and changed the scope of dictionaries of the language. Greater comprehensivity became the common ambition. Up to the early eighteenth century, English dictionaries had generally focused on "hard words" and their explanation, for example those of Thomas Blount and Edward ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
The New World Of English Words
''The New World of English Words, or, a General Dictionary'' is a dictionary compiled by Edward Phillips and first published in London in 1658. It was the first folio English dictionary. Contents As well as containing common words, the dictionary featured many unusual words, foreign terms, proper nouns and other specialist terms. In total, the original edition featured 11,000 entries, increasing to 17,000 by the fifth edition in 1696. It was later revised and enlarged by John Kersey in 1706, eventually containing 38,000 entries. Kersey had already compiled his own dictionary, ''A New English Dictionary'', in 1702, and used this revised edition of ''The New World of English Words'' as the basis for his more concise ''Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum'' in 1708. Plagiarism At least half of the entries were copied directly, without permission, from Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', which had been published a couple of years before. Blount responded by publishing ''A world of errors ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |