; and, if the present prevalence of our language
should invite foreigners to this Dictionary, many will be assisted by
those words, which now seem only to increase or produce obscurity. For
this reason I have endeavoured frequently to join a Teutonick and Roman
interpretation, as to _cheer_, to _gladden_ or _exhilarate_, that every
learner of English may be assisted by his own tongue.

The solution of all difficulties, and the supply of all defects, must be
sought in the examples, subjoined to the various senses of each word,
and ranged according to the time of their authors.

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every
quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a
word; I, therefore, extracted from philosophers principles of science;
from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from
divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.
Such is design, while it is yet at a distance from execution. When the
time called upon me to range this accumulation of elegance and wisdom
into an alphabetical series, I soon discovered that the bulk of my
volumes would fright away the student, and was forced to depart from my
scheme of including all that was pleasing or useful in English
literature, and reduce my transcripts very often to clusters of words,
in which scarcely any meaning is retained: thus to the weariness of
copying, I was condemned to add the vexation of expunging. Some passages
I have yet spared, which may relieve the labour of verbal searches, and
intersperse with verdure and flowers the dusty deserts of barren
philology.

The examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be con sidered as
conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authors; the word, for the
sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has
been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty
detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed:
the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system.

Some of the examples have been taken from writers who were never
mentioned as masters of elegance, or models of style; but words must be
sought where they are used; and in what pages, eminent for purity, can
terms of manufacture or agriculture be found? Many quotations serve no
other purpose, than that of proving the bare existence of words, and
are, therefore, selected with less scrupulousness than those