Children's Web Magazine

Dr. Samuel Johnson is the man that created the dictionary in 1755. He was born on the 18th September 1709 in Lichfield England. He came from a poor background. His father ran a bookshop and like others it was his father's profession that helped shape his future. He went to Oxford but sadly after a year he had to leave as he was unable to afford to continue.
He became first a teacher and then a writer. He married Elizabeth Porter in 1735 when he was 25 years- old. She was 20 years older and already had several grown up children from a previous marriage.
It would take him 8 years to complete his language dictionary. It was not the first of its kind there had been many before. But it was Johnson's dictionary that would be the superior one.
It was a huge, over a foot tall, measuring 20 inches in width and the weight was 22lbs or nearly 10 kilos. It contained 42,773 numbers of words. He also wrote essays, biographies, poems and reports.
He had many influential friends the artist, Joshua Reynolds, the politician Edmund Burke and writer Oliver Goldsmith. James Boswell was also a friend and he would later write his biography.
He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1765 by Trinity College Dublin. In 1775 he received one from Oxford. He was also given a government pension in 1762. Never having been well off this helped him to live in reasonable comfort.
Dr. Samuel Johnson died on the 13th December 1784.

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