Between 1750 and 1775 CE, English-speaking societies developed powerful ways to collect, explain and judge words. Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755; Robert Lowth’s influential grammar appeared in 1762; the first instalments of Encyclopaedia Britannica were published in Edinburgh from 1768; and in 1773 Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London. This is a story of dictionaries, rules, reference works—and the people whom society tried to exclude from literary authority.
Why does the history of English from 1750 to 1775 matter? A language gains new power when readers can consult a meaning, study a grammar or find a careful explanation of an unfamiliar subject. Yet books that describe ‘proper English’ can also confuse a social preference with a universal linguistic fact. The same period that celebrated scholarship contained slavery, empire and profound inequalities of education and publication. A dictionary could open a door, but not everyone was allowed to walk through it on equal terms.
The first principle is straightforward: a language reference book can describe and recommend usage, but it does not own the language. People continually speak beyond the boundaries of any single volume. This chapter follows four linked questions: Who records words? Who writes rules? Who collects knowledge? And whose voice is recognised as worth preserving?
Follow the chronology: 1725–1750 CE: Gulliver, the Magazine and the Letter Novel · Master of English Language.
A library visitor opens a book too big for the desk
Imagine you are a reader in London in 1755. You have seen small wordbooks before, perhaps consulted a teacher or guessed unfamiliar vocabulary from the surrounding sentence. Now a remarkable work arrives in two imposing volumes, designed to document a vast range of English words, their meanings and examples from writers.
You look up a word you thought you knew. Several definitions appear. One is the ordinary meaning; another is more specialised; quotations show that authors used the same word differently in different settings. Suddenly the word is not a little label glued to an object. It is a history of people making meaning.
This is the great educational pleasure of a historical dictionary. It can make the familiar unfamiliar again, not because English has become deliberately difficult, but because the reader sees more of the decisions beneath everyday speech.
1755: What Samuel Johnson actually accomplished
Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. Earlier English dictionaries existed; Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall had appeared in 1604, and a much larger lexicographical tradition preceded Johnson. His dictionary stood out for its breadth, literary quotations, definitions, attention to word history and considerable editorial labour.
The Library of Congress preserves a copy of Johnson’s two-volume work, which makes the basic historical point easy to verify. Look at the title, date, scale and description. Then resist the temptation to imagine that 1755 was the moment English finally became correct.
Johnson was writing about a living language. He could compare usage, choose examples, praise or criticise constructions and exercise editorial judgment. He could not arrange for every speaker from London to the Caribbean to abandon their habits when the new volumes arrived.
The word standard can mislead here. A reference work can help establish shared conventions, particularly in education and publishing. But a convention is not a natural law. Some forms become prestigious because they are used by institutions with influence. Other forms may remain perfectly systematic within their own speech communities.
What is a dictionary actually for?
Try asking three questions whenever you consult a dictionary. First, which sense of the word is appropriate to the sentence? Second, what evidence shows people using it that way? Third, does its level of formality fit the purpose? One word can be accurate in a laboratory report and awkward in a conversation with a child.
An English learner who memorises one definition without context may become overconfident. Consider a word such as charge: it can relate to money, electricity, legal accusation, responsibility or an act of moving forward. A dictionary can map those meanings; a sentence identifies which path is being followed.
Johnson’s use of quotations made a significant contribution to that relationship between a definition and the written record. Readers could encounter a meaning and inspect an example rather than receiving only a bald declaration.
Yet quotations require their own critical reading. Choosing respected writers as examples gives a dictionary an editorial centre. The habits of everyday speakers and communities excluded from literary prestige can be underrepresented. A dictionary is a map made from available and selected evidence, not an aerial photograph of every utterance.
1759: English also becomes a home for philosophical stories
Johnson was more than a dictionary-maker. In 1759 he published The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, a philosophical narrative in prose. The work examines hopes about happiness, experience and choices. Its significance for this journey is the variety of jobs that a single author could perform in English.
As a lexicographer, Johnson gives words explicit definitions. As a storyteller, he can dramatise a question and allow characters’ decisions to expose a difficult truth. Those are different teaching methods. A dictionary is helpful when a reader needs a clear boundary around a term; fiction is often helpful when the difficulty concerns how human motives interact.
A useful lesson follows: English knowledge is not only a matter of correct naming. It also includes knowing which form of explanation suits the problem.
1762: Robert Lowth and the urge to correct grammar
In 1762, Robert Lowth published A Short Introduction to English Grammar. The book became influential in the tradition of prescribing, explaining and evaluating English usage. Its rules and criticisms contributed to educational debates that continue in different forms today.
There are two things a grammar book can do, and it is useful not to confuse them. A descriptive grammar examines patterns that speakers actually use. A prescriptive grammar recommends conventions or judges forms against a chosen standard. A book can contain both impulses.
Imagine a teacher telling a student to use a formal construction in an examination essay. That advice may be perfectly practical. The examination expects a particular register. But it does not follow that every different construction heard in family conversation is evidence that the speaker lacks grammar.
Human languages are structured even when their structures differ from a schoolbook’s preferences. Informal English, regional dialects and other established varieties are not collections of random mistakes. They have conventions that speakers learn and use with impressive precision.
Why did printed grammar rules matter?
As schooling, commerce, publishing and administration expanded, shared written conventions became valuable. A business letter must be understood by people who may never meet. A textbook needs reasonably consistent explanations. A government document requires enough stability to support interpretation.
It is therefore easy to see why grammar books attracted readers. Consistency can reduce friction when people cooperate across distance. However, the social power to determine what counts as ‘good writing’ does not distribute itself equally.
Rules often carry the prestige of the people who publish them. A community’s everyday speech may be stigmatised not because it is linguistically incoherent but because its speakers have less status. A careful educator separates teaching a useful formal convention from humiliating someone for the language they already know.
That distinction is a civilisational gain. It lets a student acquire new forms of expression without being asked to despise their home language or identity.
The Scottish Enlightenment changes the geography of English knowledge
There is another easy mistake in telling the century’s story: treating London as the only centre of English intellectual life. Universities, printers and scholars in Scotland contributed enormously to the development of English-language scholarship, philosophy and publishing.
The work of thinkers and publishers in Edinburgh shows that the language’s intellectual growth was distributed. Scots, Scottish Gaelic, English and Latin all belong to the wider linguistic environment; the prestige of English-language reference books should not make the others invisible.
That brings us to a particularly ambitious publishing experiment. What if a reader wanted not just the meaning of a word but an explanation of nearly every major subject that educated writers considered worth knowing? A dictionary alone could not answer the demand.
1768: Encyclopaedia Britannica begins as an Edinburgh project
The first instalments of Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared in December 1768 in Edinburgh. The first edition was issued in weekly parts and completed in 1771, later forming three volumes. The partnership of printer Colin Macfarquhar and engraver Andrew Bell engaged William Smellie to compile the work.
The National Library of Scotland has digitised the first edition, making it possible to inspect the original project rather than relying entirely on a modern summary. The pages show both the ambition of organising knowledge and the limits of what editors at that time believed they knew.
An encyclopaedia changes how a reader approaches ignorance. Instead of beginning with a familiar word and seeking its meaning, a person may begin with a topic—astronomy, medicine, mechanics, agriculture—and move through a connected explanation.
That is a different promise from a dictionary. A dictionary helps identify and use a linguistic item. An encyclopaedia attempts to organise an area of knowledge. Both need good definitions, but the encyclopaedia must also handle relationships, evidence, procedure and uncertainty.
A reference work needs a correction mechanism
Imagine the first edition contains a mistaken medical explanation. The printing is beautiful. The prose is confident. Thousands of readers may find it persuasive. Nothing about the quality of the paper makes the claim scientifically correct.
That is why good reference reading asks not only ‘What does this page say?’ but ‘How was the claim obtained?’ and ‘Has later knowledge revised it?’ The first edition of a famous work is a precious historical source without being the best authority on present-day medicine or physics.
This is a principle as important in 2026 as in 1768: a trustworthy reference system does not preserve every old claim as permanently true; it preserves the trail by which claims can be checked and corrected.
The history of dictionaries and encyclopaedias is therefore a history of knowledge governance. It concerns dates, sources, responsible editors, editions and the difference between storing a sentence and validating the world it describes.
1773: Phillis Wheatley and who gets to be heard
Now turn the page to London in 1773. A volume called Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is published under the name Phillis Wheatley. Born in West Africa and enslaved as a child, Wheatley had been taken to Boston. She learned to read and write English in the household that enslaved her and developed a remarkable literary command of classical and religious forms.
Her book, published in London, marked the first published poetry collection by an African American poet. The Library of Congress preserves a first-edition copy, and its historical account explains the circumstances of the publication.
Why place this moment beside grammar and dictionaries? Because an account of literary authority must ask which writers society considered capable of producing serious English. Wheatley faced a system in which freedom, opportunity and the right to publish were allocated unjustly. Her achievement demonstrates both extraordinary talent and the barriers that shaped whose talent could be recognised.
Her poems should not be reduced to a convenient lesson in perseverance. They are literary works requiring attention to allusion, rhythm, religious vocabulary, classical learning, argument and the circumstances of their composition. Her life and work belong in the intellectual history of English, not merely in a footnote about slavery.
English had no single owner
Across the Atlantic world, English became entangled with slavery, commerce and political argument. Enslaved and free Africans, Indigenous peoples, European colonists and many others encountered the language under very different conditions. Some used English to communicate across groups; some were forced into English-speaking institutions; others used writing to challenge the moral arrangements of those institutions.
It would be too simple to call the eighteenth century a triumph in which more books meant more freedom for everyone. The same expanding print world could circulate attacks on enslavement and arguments that defended it. The existence of a printed claim tells us someone could publish it, not that it deserved acceptance.
The history of English is thus a history of contested access to expression. A woman could master literary English while being denied the ordinary rights of a free person. A grammar could prescribe civility while the society around it maintained brutal inequalities. There is no honest linguistic history that leaves out those contradictions.
The difference between language skill and social permission
A student might be told that a person who speaks in an unfamiliar accent is less capable. That judgement does not follow from the accent. English proficiency is a collection of abilities, and any one performance must be assessed in the context of its purpose.
Likewise, the fact that a writer’s work failed to enter the best-known archive does not establish that they lacked intelligence. Historical survival depends on publication opportunities, money, institutions, copying and preservation as well as quality.
That realisation transforms how we read a dictionary or a literary history. We begin asking not only what is inside the book, but what conditions determined the contents.
A practical reading model from the years 1750 to 1775
The four major developments of this period can be turned into a learning method. Begin with the word, move to the sentence, examine the explanation, then ask whose evidence has been included.
- Dictionary: identify the intended sense and inspect a genuine usage example.
- Grammar: understand the relationship in the sentence and whether a formal convention is relevant.
- Encyclopaedia: follow the explanation from definitions to evidence and related concepts.
- Literary source: recognise the author’s perspective and the social circumstances that shaped publication.
A student who can move between those four modes is more than a careful test-taker. The student is becoming a reader who can recognise the authority—and limits—of different forms of English writing.
Questions readers often ask
Did Samuel Johnson write the first English dictionary? No. Earlier English dictionaries existed. His 1755 work was especially influential because of its scale and use of literary quotations.
Does grammar come from books? No. Speakers acquire patterned grammar through language use. Grammar books describe, organise and sometimes prescribe particular conventions.
Was Encyclopaedia Britannica first published in London? No. Its first edition began appearing in Edinburgh in 1768 and was completed in 1771.
Why is Phillis Wheatley important to English literature? Her 1773 poetry collection was a major milestone in African American literary publication, and her writing offers rich evidence of language, intellectual exchange and unequal access to authorship.
The century’s next question is political
By 1775, English could support elaborate definitions, ambitious reference books, literary poetry and increasingly public political argument. But when a writer declares a human right, the next question is unavoidable: who is included in the word human? The story continues in 1775–1800 CE: Independence, Equiano, Wollstonecraft and Romantic Poetry.
Historical evidence and further reading
- Library of Congress: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) — first-edition bibliographic and scanned-book record.
- Open Library: Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) — publication history.
- National Library of Scotland: the first Encyclopaedia Britannica — Edinburgh publication beginning 1768.
- National Library of Scotland: digitised editions, 1768 onward — records and original volumes.
- Library of Congress: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) — rare-book edition.
- Library of Congress: Phillis Wheatley’s life and first collection — historical summary.
- Master of English Language — complete chronological and learning route.
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