tury: Nelson, Wellesley, Wellington, and all our
commanders and diplomatists wrote _Dispatches_; but since about 1820,
the filtering down of the influence of Johnson's Dictionary has caused
this erroneous spelling _despatch_ to become generally known and to be
looked upon as authoritative; so that at the present time about half
our newspapers give the erroneous form, to which, more larmentably,
the Post Office, after long retaining the correct official tradition,
recently capitulated.

But despite small blemishes[14], the dictionary was a marvellous piece
of work to accomplish in eight and a half years; and it is quite
certain that, if all the quotations had had to be verified and
furnished with exact references, a much longer time, or the employment
of much more collaboration, would have been required. With much
antecedent preparation, with much skilled co-operation, and with
strenuous effort, it took more than nine years to produce the first
three letters of the alphabet of the Oxford New English Dictionary.

Johnson's great work raised English lexicography altogether to a
higher level. In his hands it became a department of literature. The
value of the Dictionary was recognized from the first by men of
letters; a second edition was called for the same year. But it hardly
became a popular work, or even a work of popular fame, before the
present century. For forty years after its first publication editions
of Bailey followed each other as rapidly as ever; numerous new
dictionaries of the size and character of Bailey, often largely
indebted to Johnson's definitions, appeared. But the only new feature
introduced into lexicography between 1755 and the end of the century
was the indication of the Orthoepy or Pronunciation. From Bailey
onward, and by Johnson himself, the place of the stress-accent had
been marked, but no attempt had been made to show how such a group of
letters, for example, as _colonel_, or _enough_, or _phthisical_, was
actually pronounced; or, to use modern phraseology, to tell what the
_living word_ itself was, as distinguished from its written symbol.
This feature, so obviously important in a language of which the
spelling had ceased to be phonetic, was added by Dr. William Kenrick
in his 'New Dictionary' of 1773, a little later in 1775 by William
Perry, in 1780 by Thomas Sheridan, and especially in 1791 by John
Walker, whose authority long remained as supreme in the domain of
pronunciation, as that