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Henry Hitchings. Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Samuel Johnson is said to be the second-most quoted person in English after Shakespeare. Some of those quotes come from his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, a volume comprising 42,773 entries.
Johnson's dictionary was intended to be the English equivalent of volumes produced decades earlier by Italian and French academies. A group of publishers contacted him to produce it in...