The next stage is marked by Johnson’s systematic use of quotations to illustrate and justify the definitions, the many omissions still existing in the vocabulary being partly filled by later supplementary works on the same lines. The principle of general inclusion was practically accepted by Kersey and Bailey. The widening of this arrow range during the seventeenth century is made obvious by the steady increase in size through Ballokar, Cockeram, Blount, and Phillips until the eighteenth. The earlier dictionary makers followed in the line of the old glossaries and directed their attention to such words as were likely to be unfamiliar to the ordinary man. The immensity of this growth is explained by the successive introduction of three new principles in lexicography. To set Cawdrey’s a ‘s alim small volume of 1604 beside the completed Oxford Dictionary of 1933 is like placing the original acom beside the oak that has grown out. If there is any truth in the old Greek maxim that a large book is a great evil, English dictionaries have been steadily growing worse ever since their inception more than three centuries ago.
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