The History of the English DictionaryIn 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. It had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been acclaimed as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship". 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 Languagebecame 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 Languagebut he also wrote many poems and famous articles. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, and the widely read tale The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.5.Elizabeth Porter ______.