Johnson Publishes a Dictionary and Lexicography Gets Its Model

Lexicography is the compiling and study of dictionaries and word meaning, establishing what a term actually meant at a specific historical period and how its meaning has shifted from that period to current usage. The English writer Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on 15 April 1755, after eight years of work, and its defining innovation was to support each definition with dated quotations drawn from across English literature, letting a reader see a word's meaning demonstrated by documented usage rather than asserted by the lexicographer's authority alone, a method that shaped English lexicography for more than a century afterward.

A religious term whose modern sense differs sharply from its meaning in an older scripture or liturgical text, sin, grace, spirit, soul, is exactly the kind of case Johnson's citation based method is built to untangle, tracing a word's documented usage across periods rather than assuming its current sense was always its sense. The atlas relies on lexicography wherever a doctrinal argument turns on what a specific term meant when a foundational text was actually written, distinguishing that period's documented usage from a later, anachronistic reading.