a definition, I have placed his authority as a
supplement to my own, without regard to the chronological order, that is
otherwise observed.

Some words, indeed, stand unsupported by any authority, but they are
commonly derivative nouns or adverbs, formed from their primitives by
regular and constant analogy, or names of things seldom occurring in
books, or words of which I have reason to doubt the existence.

There is more danger of censure from the multiplicity than paucity of
examples; authorities will sometimes seem to have been accumulated
without necessity or use, and, perhaps, some will be found, which might,
without loss, have been omitted. But a work of this kind is not hastily
to be charged with superfluities: those quotations, which to careless or
unskilful perusers appear only to repeat the same sense, will often
exhibit, to a more accurate examiner, diversities of significations, or,
at least, afford different shades of the same meaning: one will show the
word applied to persons, another to things; one will express an ill,
another a good, and a third a neutral sense; one will prove the
expression genuine from an ancient author; another will show it elegant
from a modern: a doubtful authority is corroborated by another of more
credit; an ambiguous sentence is ascertained by a passage clear and
determinate: the word, how often soever repeated, appears with new
associates, and in different combinations, and every quotation
contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
When words are used equivocally, I receive them in either sense; when
they are metaphorical, I adopt them in their primitive acceptation.

I have sometimes, though rarely, yielded to the temptation of exhibiting
a genealogy of sentiments, by showing how one author copied the thoughts
and diction of another: such quotations are, indeed, little more than
repetitions, which might justly be censured, did they not gratify the
mind, by affording a kind of intellectual history.

The various syntactical structures occurring in the examples have been
carefully noted; the license or negligence, with which many words have
been hitherto used, has made our style capricious and indeterminate;
when the different combinations of the same word are exhibited together,
the preference is readily given to propriety, and I have often
endeavoured to direct the choice.

Thus I have laboured, by settling the orthography, displaying the
analo