The History of the English Dictionary
     In 1746, Samuel Johnson began to work on his most famous book, the Dictionary of the English Language. It took him nine years to complete and in that time, he wrote meanings for more than 40,000 words.
 It was the first English dictionary to include so many words.
     Johnson was born in Staffordshire, Britain in 1709. His father was a bookseller and the family was not
 very rich. Johnson was a very clever student and he went to Oxford University in 1728. After Oxford,
 he became a school teacher but he was not happy about his job. In 1735, he married a woman named
 Elizabeth Porter. He was twenty-five years old and she was forty-six.
     A few years after that, Johnson got a job to write the English dictionary. He worked in a house in 
 London and he had six men to help him. To write the dictionary, Johnson looked for words used by the
 important English writers in those days. He underlined the sentences where the words were used and
 wrote them in his notebooks. Then he gave his notebooks to his workers and they wrote the words and
 the sentences out neatly. After that, they put the words in order according to the English alphabet. Once
 that was done, Johnson would write the meanings for the words.
     When it was completed, the Dictionary of the English Language became famous and it was used by
 many people in that time. Johnson was a happy man because of that, but his wife died before the
 dictionary was completed and she never got to share her husband's happiness.
     Johnson died in London in 1784. In his lifetime, he not only wrote the Dictionary of the English
 Language but he also wrote many poems and famous articles.