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

Read the excerpts from Samuel Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.Thus have I laboured by settling the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the signification of English words, to perform all the parts of a faithful lexicographer: but I have not always executed my own scheme, or satisfied my own expectations.

Which word has a negative connotation?

[BLANK]

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 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 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 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.

Read the sentence from Samuel Johnson's preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction.

Read the excerpt from Samuel Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language.The solution of all difficulties, and the supply of all defects, must be sought in the examples, subjoined to the various senses of each word, and ranged according to the time of their authours.When first I collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.