1609: The 1st Dictionary Didn't have X | May 11, 2019

Johnson's 1755 dictionary was the first to add definitions, but it did not contain a section for the letter X. His rationale for this was that no English word began with it. In some sense, especially in 1755, that was true. Xylophones did not exist, and x-rays didn't either, but even so, most of the words that have X were, and still are, from Greek, and his dictionary did not include many technical terms; of the 250,000-odd words in English at the time, he only included 42,773. Moreover his dictionary was focused on promoting English, so including foreign words would not have helped in this goal. Read yesterday's post about this dictionary here.