Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Quotes Research

Quotations from Johnson’s Dictionary is a search engine and web tool that identifies the original sources of the literary quotations Samuel Johnson used to illustrate his eighteenth-century Dictionary of the English Language. Sponsored by Dr. Amy Giroux as part of CHDR’s broader Johnson’s Dictionary Online effort, the project tackles a thorny scholarly problem: Johnson defined words by quoting examples from plays, the Bible, and other works of his era—but he frequently paraphrased those quotes, sometimes altered the titles, and often left them unattributed entirely. This makes tracing each quotation to its origin a painstaking manual task. The team built an algorithm that takes Johnson’s defining quotations and searches across multiple online text repositories—such as Project Gutenberg and the Liberty Fund—to find all possible source matches, scoring each match for likely accuracy. A companion web application then lets researchers review those matches, manually choose the best one when several are possible, and export the verified results in XML. The result is a tool that brings structure and citation to a famously inconsistent text, giving historians and literary scholars a powerful aid in the ongoing work of digitizing and understanding this foundational work of English.