"Lexicographer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many residences in London that there is some difficulty in choosing the one that is most interesting to us. The house in Gough Square has special claims to attention, as it was there that the great lexicographer chiefly compiled his dictionary. The garret, with its slanting roof, in which his amanuenses worked, and his own study are still to be been. Johnson himself, in his "Life of Milton," observes, "I ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... so much of a public character and so popular with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound: concerning him there is a kind of evidence, and very valuable it is, that may be called a Boswell Collective. It is fitting that it should be so. We cannot picture G.K. like the great lexicographer accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness, pencil in hand, ready to take notes over the teacups. (And by the way, in spite of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that G.K. was not latterly more often seen in taverns, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... denied.—Such, in the fifteenth century, were the poets John and Clement Marot; such was the celebrated physician, Dalechamps, to whom naturalists are indebted for the Historia Plantarum; such the laborious lexicographer, Constantin; and, not to extend the catalogue needlessly, such above all was Malherbe. The medal that has been struck at Caen in honor of this great man, at the expence of Monsieur de Lair, bears for its epigraph, the three first words of Boileau's ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... 1742), English philologist and lexicographer. He compiled a Dictionarium Britannicum: a more compleat universal etymological English dictionary than any extant, bearing the date 1730, but supposed to have been published in 1721. This was a great improvement on all previous attempts, and formed the basis of Dr Johnson's great ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... request. Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not more frequently invited out; and he said, 'Because great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped.' Garrick was not in this predicament: he could amuse the company in the drawing-room by imitating the great moralist and lexicographer, and make the negro-boy in the courtyard die with laughing to see him take off the swelling airs and strut of the turkey-cock. This was clever and amusing, but it did not involve an opinion, it did not lead to a difference of sentiment, in which the owner of the house ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... share in its daily toils, as well as pleasures—and can perfectly well understand our language, and sympathize with our thoughts. They are the thoughts of rural life everywhere. It was old Sam Johnson, the great lexicographer, who lumbered his unwieldy gait through the streets of cities for a whole life, and with all his vast learning and wisdom, had no appreciation of the charms of the country, that said, "Who feeds fat cattle should himself be fat;" ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... Daniel), the shepherd lass who rejected Colin Clout (the poet Spenser) for Menalcas (John Florio, the lexicographer, 1579). Spenser was at the time in his twenty-sixth year. Being rejected by Rosalind, he did not marry till he was nearly 41, and then we are told that Elizabeth "was the name of his mother, queen and wife" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... &. C. Merriam:—Gentlemen, I have just had the honor of receiving the noble volume in which you and the great lexicographer, and the accomplished reviser, unite your labors to "bid the language live." I accept it with the highest pride and pleasure, and beg to adopt in its utmost strength and extent, the testimonial of ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... lamented, early in the present century, the neglect into which the works of Richardson had fallen. That neglect has not since been diminished, for obvious reasons. "Surely, sir," said Erskine to Johnson, "Richardson is very tedious." "Why, sir," was the lexicographer's reply, "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself, but you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... enough, where the debt is so large. The great merit of Dr. Richardson's Dictionary being the number of illustrative passages he has brought together, it is hardly fair in Mr. Swinton so often to make a show of learning with what he has got at second hand from the lexicographer. Dr. Trench could also make large reclamations, and several others. There is beside an unpleasant assumption of superiority in the book. An author who says that paganus means village, who makes ocula ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Middle Ages, the word stauros seems to have primarily signified a straight piece of wood without a cross-bar. For the famous Greek lexicographer, Suidas, expressly states, "Stauroi; ortha xula perpegota," and both Eustathius and Hesychius affirm that it meant a straight stake ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... you please, is of a very different stamp to an English one. The "learned lexicographer"—and pedantic old bore, by the way—Doctor Johnson, defined the individual in question to be "one who prepares or revises any literary work for publication;" and, we generally associate the name with the supreme head of a journalistic staff—he who is addressed indignantly ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pointedly enforced. I am aware that by some I may be deemed unnecessarily fastidious; and possibly Christina, Queen of Sweden, might have applied to me the celebrated observation, said to have been elicited from her by the famed work of the laborious French Lexicographer, viz. that he was the most troublesome person in the world, for he required of every word to produce its passport, and to declare whence it came and whither it was going. I confess, I too, for the sake of my country, would wish that every word we use might be compelled to show its ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... playful allusion to the notions commonly entertained of his own laborious task. Thus: 'Grub-street, the name of a street in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called Grub-street.'—'Lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... of a volume of poetry. Nothing remains, save a letter from Noah Webster, whose early toils were manifested in a spelling-book, and those of his later age in a ponderous dictionary. Under date of February 10, 1843, he writes in a sturdy, awkward hand, very fit for a lexicographer, an epistle of old man's reminiscences, from which we extract the following anecdote of Washington, presenting the patriot ...
— A Book of Autographs - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of a fine powder as "alcohol"; and, so late as the middle of the last century, the English lexicographer, Nathan Bailey, defines "alcohol" as "the pure substance of anything separated from the more gross, a very fine and impalpable powder, or a very pure, well-rectified spirit." But, by the time of the publication of Lavoisier's "Traite Elementaire de Chimie," ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... their pronounciation. Neither will it be considered as an objection to this opinion, that in Hesychius, the Ionian term Phereas, or Pheres, denotes the satyrs of classical antiquity, if the number of words of oriental origin in that lexicographer be recollected. Of the Persian Peris, Ouseley, in his Persian Miscellanies, has described some characteristic traits, with all the luxuriance of a fancy, impregnated with the oriental association of ideas. However vaguely their nature and appearance is described, they are ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... with the growth of a language. The New English Dictionary had done the letter C before the cinematograph arrived, but got it in under K. Words of this kind are manufactured in such numbers that the lexicographer is inclined to wait and see whether they will catch on. In such cases it is hard to prophesy. The population of this country may be divided into those people who have been operated for appendicitis and those who are going to be. Yet this word ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... undertake to expound them ought to be tolerably versed in the topic. Thus perhaps there was no great harm in Dr. Johnson's being utterly ignorant of maritime language, but it was temerariously vain in that sturdy lexicographer to assert that belay is a sea-phrase for splicing a rope; main sheet, for the largest sail in a ship; and bight, for the circumference of a coil of rope; and we long had him on the hip respecting the purser, a personage whom he—misled by Burser—at once ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... difficult to imagine Dr. Johnson, who greatly delighted in Evelina, supposing the intentional upsetting into the ditch of the old French lady in the carriage to be a joke. For a man who unconsciously has made so much fun for others as "the great lexicographer," Dr. Johnson seems to have been curiously devoid of a sense of humor. But he was a genuine Englishman of his time, a true John Bull, and the fun of the John Bull of that time, recorded in the novels and traditions, ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... change more resembling country snow. 'It will save me from buttoning so high up,' he said, as he thanked her. She then remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on the side where it is tender ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it has been tacitly assumed, if not boldly claimed, that sentiment, passion, temperament, atoned for—even if they did not entirely replace—voice and lack of skill in the artist. But what constitutes an artist? Art has been defined by an English lexicographer as "Doing something, the power for which is acquired by experience, study or observation;" and an artist, as "One skilled in the practice of any art." The French writer d'Alembert says, "L'art s'acquiert par l'etude et l'exercice" (Art is acquired by study and ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... with ole fat kyat for a pillow." And to Hildegarde's mingled horror and amusement, the child curled himself up on the piazza floor, and deliberately laid his head on the broad black side of the sleeping lexicographer. The great cat opened his yellow eyes with a start, and turned his head to see "what thing upon his back had got." There was a moment of suspense. Hildegarde's first impulse was to rush forward and snatch the child away; her second was to stand perfectly still. "Dee ole kitty!" murmured ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... chief glory, is "benevolent." Who would not rejoice to have been the object of his regal philanthropy? SAMUEL JOHNSON himself did not hesitate to accept the bounty of this kindly monarch, though, while his predecessor reigned, the great lexicographer had defined a pensioner as "a state hireling" paid "for treason ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury |
