Word Meaning in the Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language Answers

Which statements describe Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language? Check all that apply.

Read the excerpt from Samuel Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.The two languages from which our primitives have been derived are the Roman and Teutonick: under the Roman I comprehend the French and provincial tongues; and under the Teutonick range the Saxon, German, and all their kindred dialects.

Read the sentence from Samuel Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.And such is the fate of hapless lexicography, that not only darkness, but light, impedes and distresses it; things may be not only too little, but too much known, to be happily illustrated.

Read the sentence from Samuel Johnson's preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.Wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety.

Which word has a negative connotation?

Read the excerpts from Samuel Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.Which statement best describes Johnson’s treatment of the underlined word?

Read the excerpts from Samuel Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.Which statement best describes the use of the underlined word in the excerpts?

Read the sentence from Samuel Johnson's preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise.

Read the excerpt from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language.Mádness. n.s. [from mad.]Distraction; loss of understanding; perturbation of the faculties.Why, woman, your husband is in his old tunes again: he so rails against all married mankind, so curses all Eve's daughters, and so buffets himself on the forehead, that any madness I ever yet beheld seemed but tameness and civility to this distemper. Shakesp. Merry Wives of Windsor.There are degrees of madness as of folly, the disorderly jumbling ideas together, in some more, some less. Locke.

Read the excerpt from Samuel Johnson's preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.From the authours which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed.It is not sufficient that a word is found, unless it be so combined as that its meaning is apparently determined by the tract and tenour of the sentence; such passages I have therefore chosen.