Do you know what a fopdoodle is? Or a dandiprat or a ponk? Dr Samuel Johnson did, and put the words in the first ever dictionary, writes Gerald Isaaman

Dr Johnson’s Dictionary by Henry Hitchings
John Murray, £14.99

HE signed the contract over breakfast at the Golden Anchor pub, near Holborn Bar, on June 18, 1746, accepting payment, in instalments, of 1,500 guineas, equivalent perhaps today of a colossal £150,000.
And for that extraordinary sum Dr Samuel Johnson, unknown, yet witty, erudite and, by his own account, a “disgracefully lazy” Grub Street hack, agreed to spend the next three years providing England with a dictionary of its own, to rival those already acclaimed in France and Italy.
That was his first mistake. He ended up taking eight years on the project, carried out in the garret rooms of a house in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where he was aided by six mostly Scottish helpers digging out thousands of quotations to illustrate the words.
And the plan he proposed for the task – the one that brought in the investors under the inspired leadership of printer Robert Dodsley – proved virtually worthless as he put together a dictionary of 42,773 entries that was finally published 250 years ago on April 15, 1755.
The whole remarkable and intriguing story of an idiosyncratic man who left his mark on the culture of the nation – and that was long before James Boswell the Scottish author of The Life of Samuel Johnson came on to the scene – is told with effervescence and scholarship by Henry Hitchings.
Indeed, Dr Johnson was an odd and melancholy fellow, born in Breadmarket Street, Lichfield, in 1709, the son of a bookseller whose easily accessible library turned his son into a bookworm, sucking up words and information, a man so strange and foreboding to look at that nobody would give him a job as a teacher because he might frighten the pupils.
He headed for London along with the actor David Garrick, who had been a pupil of his, allegedly declaring that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Yet he left behind a glorious legacy sneakingly admired even by detractors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, for himself, a safe place in the history of the nation.
Such was his fastidious concern for the dictionary – his aim was to ‘fix the English language’ once and for all – that Dr Johnson provides 133 different meanings for the verb ‘to take’ and no fewer than 363 illustrative quotations to bring them to dramatic life.
And Hitchings has fun too recalling the lost words – and their meanings – found in Dr Johnson’s mighty dictionary such as fopdoodle, witworm, jobberknowl dandiprat, pickthank and ponk, then used in a London that was a city packed with the dangers caused by gin-sodden crime, dirt and disease and the awful smells caused by the lack of sewers.
“Johnson’s finest definitions remind us that he was a poet,” writes Hitchings. “They are succinct, accurate and elegant. He is especially skilled in explaining some of those abstract or intangible things that seem least amenable to definition.
“Conscience is ‘the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of the goodness or wickedness of ourselves.’ A trance is ‘a temporary absence of the soul’. An imp is a ‘puny devil’. A rant consists of ‘high sounding language unsupported by dignity or thought’.”
Hitchings’ book is equally a fascinating social study of Dr Johnson’s times and troubles, including his equally eccentric wife Tetty, 20 years his senior, who disappeared to Frognal, in Hampstead, where she languished “always drunk and reading romances in bed, were she killed herself taking opium”.
Her death almost drove him mad. But he survived, as did his dictionary, the first twin volume edition weighing 20 pounds and costing £4 10s the pair.
Hitchings has done his hero proud and provided us with a book that proves that words, no matter how much abused and debased, do still magically count.

• A fopdoodle is a fool, a dandiprat is an urchin and a jobbernowl is a blockhead. As for ponk – it sounds like a noxious smell but is in fact a ghastly, nocturnal spirit.