For the century before Johnson's Dictionary was published in 1775, there had been concern about the state of the English language. There was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson provided the solution.
在1775年约翰逊词典出版的上一个世纪里，人们一直对英语语言的状况感到担忧。当时既没有统一的口语和书面语规范，也缺乏对如何整顿英语拼写混乱局面的共识。约翰逊为此提供了解决方案。
There had, of course, been dictionaries in the past, the first of these being a little book of some 120 pages, compiled by a certain Robert Cawdray, published in 1604 under the title A Table Alphabeticall 'of hard usuall English words'. Like the various dictionaries that came after it during the seventeenth century, Cawdray's tended to concentrate on 'scholarly' words; one function of the dictionary was to enable its student to convey an impression of fine learning.
当然，过去已有词典，最早的词典是一本约120页的小册子，由某位罗伯特·考德雷编纂，于1604年出版，名为《英文字母表：常用英语词汇》。与十七世纪之后出现的各种词典一样，考德雷的词典也倾向于收录“学术性”词汇；其功能之一便是让学习者能够表现出自己具备较高的学识水平。
Beyond the practical need to make order out of chaos, the rise of dictionaries is associated with the rise of the English middle class, who were anxious to define and circumscribe the various worlds to conquer- lexical as well as social and commercial. It is highly appropriate that Dr Samuel Johnson, the very model of an eighteenth-century literary man, as famous in his own time as in ours, should have published his Dictionary at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class.
除了为应对混乱而建立秩序的实用需求外，词典的兴起也与英国中产阶级的崛起密切相关。中产阶级迫切希望界定并规范各种领域，无论是词汇、社会还是商业层面。因此，十分恰当的是，作为18世纪文学典范的塞缪尔·约翰逊博士——无论在当时还是如今都享有盛誉——恰好在中产阶级兴盛的初期出版了他的《英语词典》。
Johnson was a poet and critic who raised common sense to the heights of genius.His approach to the problems that had worried writers throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was intensely practical. Up until his time, the task of producing a dictionary on such a large scale had seemed impossible without the establishment of an academy to make decisions about right and wrong usage. Johnson decided he did not need an academy to settle arguments about language; he would write a dictionary himself; and he would do it single-handed. Johnson signed the contract for the Dictionary with the bookseller Robert Dosley at a breakfast held at the Golden Anchor Inn near Holborn Bar on 18 June 1764. He was to be paid ~1,575 in instalments, and from this he took money to rent 17 Gough Square, in which he set up his 'dictionary workshop'.
约翰逊是一位诗人和评论家，他将常识提升到了天才的境界。他对十七世纪末至十八世纪初困扰着作家们的问题所采取的方法极为务实。在当时，若要编纂一部如此大规模的词典，似乎必须建立一个学院来裁定语言使用中的对错，否则几乎不可能实现。约翰逊认为，无需学院来解决语言争议，他可以亲自编写词典，并且独自完成这项工作。1764年6月18日，他在霍尔本巴附近金锚旅馆的一次早餐会上，与书商罗伯特·多斯利签署了《词典》的合同。他将分批获得约1575英镑的报酬，这笔钱被用来租下戈夫广场17号的房屋，作为他的“词典工作室”。
James Boswell, his biographer, described the garret where Johnson worked as 'fitted up like a counting house' with a long desk running down the middle at which the copying clerks would work standing up. Johnson himself was stationed on a rickety chair at an 'old crazy deal table' surrounded by a chaos of borrowed books. He was also helped by six assistants, two of whom died whilst the Dictionary was still in preparation.
约翰逊的传记作者詹姆斯·博斯韦尔描述了他工作的阁楼，那里“布置得如同一家账房”，中间有一张长长的桌子，抄写员们要站起身来工作。约翰逊本人则坐在一张摇摇欲坠的椅子上，面对一张“陈旧而古怪的书桌”，周围堆满了借来的书籍。他还得到了六名助手的帮助，其中两人在词典仍在编纂期间去世。
The work was immense; filling about eighty large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, and illustrated their many meanings with some 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on every subject, from the Elizabethans to his own time. He did not expect to achieve complete originality. Working to a deadline, he had to draw on the best of all previous dictionaries, and to make his work one of heroic synthesis. In fact, it was very much more. Unlike his predecessors, Johnson treated English very practically, as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. He adopted his definitions on the principle of English common law- according to precedent. After its publication, his Dictionary was not seriously rivalled for over a century.
这项工作极为繁重：约翰逊用大约八十本大笔记本，手写定义了超过四万个词汇，并从伊丽莎白时代到他所处的时代，引用了来自各个领域英文著作的约11.4万条引文，以说明这些词汇的多种含义。他并不期望能实现完全的独创性。在紧迫的期限下，他不得不汲取以往所有词典中的精华，使自己的著作成为一场雄伟的综合之作。事实上，它远不止于此。与前人不同，约翰逊将英语视为一种实用的语言，具有丰富的语义层次，采取了非常务实的态度。他依据英国普通法的原则——遵循先例——来制定词条定义。该词典出版后，一个世纪以上的时间里，都未曾有真正能与之匹敌的著作问世。
After many vicissitudes the Dictionary was finally published on 15 April 1775. It was instantly recognised as a landmark throughout Europe. 'This very noble work,' wrote the leading Italian lexicographer, 'will be a perpetual monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general Benefit to the republic of Letters throughout Europe.' The fact that Johnson had taken on the Academies of Europe and matched them (everyone knew that forty French academics had taken forty years to produce the first French national dictionary) was cause for much English celebration.
经过许多波折，这部词典终于于1775年4月15日出版。它立即被公认为欧洲的一座里程碑。“这部极为崇高的著作，”意大利著名词典编纂家写道，“将永远成为作者的荣耀丰碑，尤其为他的祖国带来荣誉，并对整个欧洲的文人共和国产生普遍裨益。”约翰逊能够超越欧洲各学术机构并与其相媲美（众所周知，四十位法国学者用了四十年才编纂出第一部法语国家词典），这一事实引发了英国人的广泛庆祝。
Johnson had worked for nine years, 'with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow'. For all its faults and eccentricities his two-volume work is a masterpiece and a landmark, in his own words, 'setting the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the significations of English words'. It is the cornerstone of Standard English, an achievement which, in James Boswell's words,'conferred stability on the language of his country'.
约翰逊工作了九年，"几乎没有得到学者的协助，也未获得权贵的庇护；他既不在退休的软弱模糊中，也不在学术界的庇护之下，而是在困苦与纷扰之中，在疾病与悲伤里辛勤耕耘"。尽管这部两卷本著作存在诸多缺陷和怪异之处，但它仍是一部杰作和里程碑之作。正如他本人所言，"它确立了英语的正字法，展现了词义的类比，规范了词形结构，并厘清了英语词语的意义"。它是标准英语的基石，詹姆斯·博斯韦尔曾评价说，这一成就"使他的国家语言获得了稳定性"。
The Dictionary, together with his other writing, made Johnson famous and so well esteemed that his friends were able to prevail upon King George III to offer him a pension. From then on, he was to become the Johnson of folklore.
《词典》连同他的其他著作，使约翰逊声名远扬，备受推崇，以至于他的朋友们成功说服乔治三世为他提供一笔养老金。从此，他便成为民间传说中的“约翰逊”。