Imagine opening an enormous dictionary on a desk in London in 1755. You are not looking at a slim school handbook. You have two imposing volumes, filled with words, explanations and examples from English writers. You can consult a word you thought you knew and discover that it has several meanings. You can encounter a quotation from a favourite author and see that the dictionary’s maker has used literature as evidence.
That desk belongs to one of the most influential chapters in the history of English. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755, following earlier reference works and preceding a new period of interest in grammar and standard usage. English was also travelling into new political and geographical settings. The United States emerged from revolution, Noah Webster began creating teaching materials for American learners, and British settlement in Australia began in 1788 on land already inhabited by many Indigenous language communities.
What happened to English between 1700 and 1800? It became more thoroughly described in dictionaries, more widely taught through books, and increasingly entangled with the institutions of empire and nationhood. This is the century in which people became especially anxious to answer a difficult question: who gets to decide which English is correct?
Go deeper into this period: How Dictionaries Learned to Remember English — From Samuel Johnson back to Cawdrey and forward to the quotation evidence of the OED.
A language nobody had finished writing down
By 1700, English had a long documented history. It was the language of Shakespeare, Milton, scientific reports, sermons, private letters, printed Bibles and ordinary conversation.
Yet there was no single book that could reliably settle every question about its vocabulary. Different writers chose different spellings; meanings shifted; new terms arrived through travel, learning and commerce.
That variability was not proof that English had failed. It was the predictable result of a language used by people across many settings.
Readers, teachers and writers nevertheless wanted resources. A dictionary could help them interpret unfamiliar words; a grammar could give learners a way to recognise sentence patterns; a style guide might offer conventions for formal writing.
The need for shared reference grew as books and newspapers carried language beyond their original communities.
An eighteenth-century dictionary was therefore a response to a growing communication problem, not a machine for inventing language.
The coffeehouse and the printed page
Imagine a London coffeehouse where people discuss the latest newspaper, a political pamphlet and a recently published poem.
Not everyone agrees about the issues. Not everyone has received the same education. Yet the printed page gives them something they can refer to together.
During the eighteenth century, periodicals, newspapers and books became important settings for debate and entertainment, although access was shaped by wealth, literacy and social position.
The Spectator, founded in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, is one familiar example of essayistic writing directed towards an urban reading public.
The language of such publications had to be legible and engaging. Readers wanted not only facts but also explanations, anecdotes and judgments about society.
This helped establish genres in which argument and conversation could coexist.
The broader change is easy to recognise: English was becoming an increasingly important instrument for shared public discussion among people who might never meet one another.
Can writing make a society think together?
A conversation depends on the people present. A printed essay can travel to readers the writer has never met.
That longer reach creates new obligations. A reader needs enough context to understand the claim; a writer needs to anticipate possible objections; an editor needs to make decisions about meaning and presentation.
When a printed argument circulates widely, misunderstandings and mistakes can circulate with it.
The development of English prose therefore involves more than choosing elegant vocabulary. It involves making thought understandable beyond a local circle.
This is why the eighteenth century produced so much interest in rhetoric, grammar and usage.
Writers wanted their work to reach others across differences of region and education.
But a desire for communication can become something less helpful when a preferred style is treated as evidence that other dialects are inherently deficient.
The same language can support useful conventions and unfair judgments about its speakers.
Samuel Johnson takes on an extraordinary job
Samuel Johnson was already a major literary figure when he undertook the task of creating a comprehensive English dictionary.
His A Dictionary of the English Language appeared on 15 April 1755 in two large volumes.
The Examining the OED research project at the University of Oxford explains why Johnson’s work was exceptional: it used literary quotations to support and illuminate definitions rather than offering only brief equivalents.
Johnson did not invent English lexicography. Robert Cawdrey’s monolingual dictionary had appeared in 1604, and other dictionaries had followed.
Johnson greatly enlarged the ambition of a dictionary by presenting words in relation to their actual uses and to the literary culture he knew.
The result was not a flawless description of every English-speaking community. It was a huge scholarly achievement shaped by Johnson’s sources, judgments and historical circumstances.
One man could assemble a remarkably useful map without the map becoming the whole territory.
A word may have more than one meaning
Think about the word light.
It can describe illumination, something that is not heavy, an act of ignition or a quality of colour. Those meanings are connected through histories and usage patterns, but they cannot all be replaced with one brief synonym.
A dictionary needs to distinguish senses rather than merely list words.
Johnson’s use of quotations offered readers examples of how a term functioned in sentences. The surrounding words help readers decide which meaning is intended.
This is an important principle of language learning. A vocabulary item does not become useful simply because a student has memorised its first definition.
Meaning depends on context, collocation, register and the purpose of the speaker.
A good dictionary can reveal those relationships, while a careless reader may still select the wrong sense.
The eighteenth-century effort to collect examples therefore points towards a modern understanding of vocabulary as a system of use, not merely a warehouse of isolated labels.
Did Johnson fix English forever?
No.
Johnson’s dictionary influenced spelling and usage, but English continued changing. His definitions and choices were shaped by the resources available to him, the literary examples he selected and his understanding of his own time.
The dictionary itself was revised, including a substantial fourth edition in 1773.
The existence of revisions is revealing. A reference work can have authority while remaining subject to correction.
Johnson’s example helped establish an approach to English vocabulary in which evidence and explanation mattered. It did not give one eighteenth-century editor permanent control over all future English.
A language is learned through use across generations. A dictionary may influence that process but cannot stop it.
This is why later dictionaries did not simply reprint Johnson forever. They collected new words, reassessed old senses and drew on different varieties and historical sources.
The more widely English travelled, the more difficult it became for one person’s selection to represent everyone.
The grammar question becomes public
A dictionary explains vocabulary, while a grammar attempts to describe or teach patterns of expression.
During the eighteenth century, many influential books offered advice about correct English.
Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, became a notable contribution to the teaching of grammar and usage.
Such works did more than list grammatical forms. They frequently recommended particular habits and criticised expressions used by writers who had otherwise been regarded as accomplished.
This is a valuable moment for readers to distinguish descriptive grammar from prescriptive advice.
A descriptive account asks how people actually use language in particular communities. A prescriptive rule recommends how a person ought to write or speak in a particular setting.
Both can be useful, but they answer different questions.
Confusion arises when one social preference is presented as a timeless fact about what language can or cannot do.
Why an English grammar can help without becoming a law of nature
Imagine a learner writing an important letter to someone unfamiliar.
The learner needs to choose words and sentence patterns that the recipient will understand. Shared conventions can make that easier.
A rule about formal punctuation or sentence structure may be valuable in a particular professional context. But the rule’s usefulness does not mean every other form of speech is unintelligent.
Natural languages contain internal systems of grammar, including dialects that differ from socially prestigious standards.
A child speaking a regional variety is not using language without structure. The child is following patterns learned from a community.
Eighteenth-century grammarians often pursued clarity and refinement, but their books also reflected social judgments about education and status.
The history of Standard English therefore cannot be separated from schools, careers, class and access to authority.
A standard can help distant readers communicate; it can also become a tool for excluding speakers whose language differs.
Who gets to say a sentence is wrong?
Suppose an expression is common in everyday speech but disapproved of in a grammar handbook.
Several questions immediately arise. Is the expression ambiguous? Does it violate a genuine pattern of the variety in question? Or has the handbook chosen one convention and criticised alternatives primarily for social reasons?
The distinction requires evidence rather than instinct.
A grammar rule may be useful for examinations and formal writing even when it is not a universal law of every English dialect.
This is why strong English education needs both explicit conventions and an understanding that language varies by context.
A student benefits from knowing how to write in a formal register, but also from recognising how other registers work.
The eighteenth century’s debates about correctness illuminate a continuing tension between teaching useful shared forms and treating one community’s habits as inherently superior.
That tension has never entirely disappeared.
The English novel offers new ways of reading society
The century also saw the growing influence of prose fiction.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, followed by other major works that helped develop the English novel’s possibilities.
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, used letters to tell a story through characters’ perspectives.
These are not the first narratives ever written in English, and scholars debate definitions of the novel and its beginnings.
What matters is the increasingly elaborate use of prose to explore individual lives, social conditions and imagined experiences.
A novel can create the sense that the reader is following a person through time. Letters can make that experience intimate by showing what one character chooses to tell another.
The technique requires control over voice and information. A writer must decide what the reader knows, what a character misunderstands and how the story reveals a larger social world.
English prose was becoming an extraordinarily flexible tool for representing human experience.
A story can reveal whose perspective is missing
When reading an eighteenth-century novel about travel, commerce or foreign places, it is important to ask who tells the story.
European writers sometimes represented colonised peoples through familiar stereotypes or the assumptions of their own societies.
A narrative can preserve valuable details while also concealing the perspectives of those who were not allowed to speak in the work.
The issue is not solved by declaring every old text worthless. It is solved by reading with attention to evidence, context and the position of the narrator.
Language has the power to describe a community. It also has the power to misrepresent that community.
As English writing travelled through colonial and commercial networks, questions of whose voices were recorded became increasingly important.
A civilisation’s literary archive can reveal both the richness of its imagination and the inequalities that shaped what was published.
English crosses an Atlantic political divide
English had been spoken in parts of colonial North America for generations before the eighteenth century.
Over time, communities developed their own accents, vocabulary and social practices. Political ties to Britain did not guarantee that language use remained identical on both sides of the Atlantic.
The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 was written in English, a language associated with British colonial rule but also used to express political separation from it.
This is an important historical irony. Political independence does not require inventing an entirely unrelated language.
The same linguistic resources can be used to make radically different political claims.
The English used in North America was also shaped by contact with Indigenous languages, other European languages and the languages of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Any account that treats American English as merely a copy of British English misses the depth and complexity of those interactions.
Noah Webster wants a new kind of classroom
Noah Webster believed education could help the emerging United States develop shared cultural practices.
His A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, first published in 1783, included the spelling material that became widely known as the blue-backed speller.
The Library of Congress describes Webster’s project as an influential attempt to establish consistent spelling and pronunciation practices for American learners.
His work did not create an entirely separate language overnight. British and American English remained closely related and mutually intelligible across many varieties.
But a schoolbook can influence millions of repeated learning experiences over generations.
When children encounter a spelling convention in lessons, that convention can become familiar and durable.
Webster’s later major dictionary appeared in 1828, outside this century. Keeping the dates separate helps us see the sequence: educational materials first, followed later by an ambitious dictionary.
What makes a language American?
There is no single sound that instantly made English American in 1776.
Varieties in North America developed through settlement history, regional contact, movement of speakers, social change and the formation of institutions.
Some pronunciations preserved features that changed elsewhere. Other features were innovations. Different regions of North America followed different paths.
The label American English is useful for discussing a broad set of varieties and written conventions, but it should not be mistaken for one perfectly uniform accent.
A schoolbook may recommend certain spellings, but speakers continue learning language from their families and neighbours.
That distinction is especially important in a country with diverse migration histories and longstanding Indigenous languages.
English spread widely, but it never became the only language spoken by everyone living in North America.
English arrives in another inhabited world
In January 1788, the First Fleet arrived in Australia, and the British established a penal colony at Sydney Cove.
The National Museum of Australia identifies this as the beginning of a new phase of British occupation and colonisation, not the discovery of an empty continent.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples already possessed rich languages, cultures, legal traditions and systems of knowledge.
English-speaking newcomers entered lands with existing communities and long histories. Colonisation led to violence, displacement, disease and profound pressures on Indigenous languages.
This cannot be described responsibly as English simply spreading to a new destination through friendly trade.
The later development of Australian English arose within those complex and often unequal conditions.
A language’s geographical expansion is a historical process with human consequences, not a scoreboard measuring the superiority of its vocabulary or grammar.
What happened to Indigenous languages in Australia?
Australia possessed—and continues to possess—a diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.
British settlement and the colonial systems that followed disrupted communities and contributed to the decline or loss of many Indigenous languages over time.
Those losses involved much more than unfamiliar vocabulary. Language carries knowledge about places, histories, relationships and practices learned across generations.
When a community loses fluent speakers, important forms of continuity can be endangered.
It would be misleading to place every consequence inside the year 1788. The processes unfolded across decades and centuries, with different experiences among communities.
Nor should Indigenous languages be treated only as relics of the past. Many communities continue to maintain, teach and revitalise their languages.
A responsible history of global English needs room for those stories alongside its account of colonial settlement.
English changes as it travels
Imagine English-speaking families in London, Philadelphia and the early Sydney settlement at the end of the eighteenth century.
They do not all live in the same physical or social world. They encounter different landscapes, other languages, local occupations and different educational institutions.
Over generations, vocabulary and pronunciation can develop in distinct ways.
That does not mean a new national English variety is created the moment a ship arrives. It takes social transmission across time.
The diversity of modern World Englishes developed through numerous such historical routes, including colonisation, migration, education, trade and later international communication.
English was becoming a language with several important geographical centres, but that world was not yet fully formed in 1800.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries would expand and transform it further.
Why a standard can never be the whole language
Johnson’s dictionary, Lowth’s grammar and Webster’s schoolbooks all attempted, in different ways, to make language more knowable and teachable.
Their influence was substantial, but none could capture every word or speaker.
A dictionary depends on selected sources. A grammar selects the patterns it describes or recommends. A schoolbook is designed for a particular educational setting.
The language lives beyond those pages, changing in households and networks that reference books do not completely observe.
That distinction does not make standardisation worthless. Shared conventions can improve communication, especially across distance and institutions.
The challenge is to treat a standard as a useful social resource without confusing it with the total intelligence of a community.
The eighteenth century supplies an enduring lesson in that balance.
A century of choices about English
1711: Addison and Steele launched The Spectator, representing a developing world of periodical essays.
1719: Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, an important landmark in English prose fiction.
1740: Richardson published Pamela, using letters as a major narrative device.
1755: Johnson’s two-volume dictionary appeared.
1762: Robert Lowth published his influential grammar.
1776: the American Declaration of Independence was issued in English.
1783: Noah Webster published his Grammatical Institute, including the early spelling materials later used widely in the United States.
1788: British settlement began at Sydney Cove, transforming the history of the region and placing English in new contact with Indigenous languages.
No event created a new English from nothing. Each changed the settings in which English could be learned, used and circulated.
Frequently asked questions
Did Samuel Johnson write the first English dictionary?
No. Robert Cawdrey and other lexicographers published earlier dictionaries. Johnson’s 1755 work was unusually influential because of its scope and its use of literary quotations to illustrate definitions.
When was Johnson’s Dictionary published?
The first edition appeared on 15 April 1755 in two large volumes.
Who wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar?
Robert Lowth published the book in 1762. It became an important example of eighteenth-century grammatical instruction and usage advice.
Did American English begin in 1776?
No. English varieties had been developing in colonial North America for generations. Independence changed political conditions but did not invent a new language instantly.
Did Noah Webster publish his famous dictionary in 1783?
No. His influential early spelling and educational materials appeared from 1783; his major American dictionary was published in 1828.
Did English first arrive in Australia in 1788?
British settlement beginning in 1788 was a major historical turning point for English in Australia. It was also a period of colonisation in a continent with many longstanding Indigenous languages.
Did dictionaries freeze English spelling and grammar?
No. They influenced conventions, education and publishing, but English continued changing in speech and writing.
Next: the language becomes an industrial and imperial network
The nineteenth century will bring mass schooling, new technologies for communication and the building of large historical dictionaries.
It will also bring English into closer contact with millions of people through colonial administration and education, including in India, Southeast Asia and the growing British settlement in Australia.
In 1819, British authorities established a trading post in Singapore through agreements with Malay rulers. Later, English would become one of the languages of its educational, commercial and administrative life.
Then, in 1828, Webster published his great American dictionary. In 1884, the first instalment of the dictionary that became the Oxford English Dictionary appeared.
Follow the previous chapter, 1600–1700 CE: Dictionaries, the King James Bible and the Language of Science, and the History of English & Language Change series overview.
Sources and further reading
- Examining the OED: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) — quotations, definitions and the dictionary’s historical importance.
- Johnson’s Dictionary Online: Guide to the Dictionary — the 1755 edition and later revision.
- Open Library: Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) — original publication record.
- Library of Congress: Books That Shaped America, 1750–1800 — Noah Webster’s 1783 speller.
- National Museum of Australia: The First Fleet Arrives at Sydney Cove — 1788 and the effects on Indigenous peoples.
- National Museum of Australia: Indigenous Cultures and Contact Timeline — the wider, enduring history of languages and encounters in Australia.