| Summary: | The present paper focuses on the history of lexicography and proposes a comparative analysis of three significant English dictionaries of the 18th century: Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (second edition, 1736), Benjamin Martin’s Lingua Britannica Reformata (first edition, 1749), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (first edition, 1755). The paper discusses the structure of the entries in these texts, concentrating on the changes undergone from Bailey to Johnson, and attempts to show that the increased complexity of Martin’s and Johnson’s lexicographic entries marks a departure from the model of the “universal” dictionary. While the structure of universal dictionaries such as Bailey’s retains important similarities with that of the encyclopaedias of the time, later 18th century dictionaries, such as those of Johnson, are closer in structure to contemporary dictionaries of the English language, indicating a more complete separation of what starts to count as “linguistic” from what starts to count as “encyclopaedic”.
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