The Selection of the Entry Words in Johnson's Dictionary and Picard's English-Dutch Dictionary
A close examination of the entry words of Johnson's English Dictionary (1755) and Picard's Pocket Dictionary of the English and Dutch Languages (1857)
reveals that the construction of the entries in each dictionary is quite alike
in the following respects:
(1) the inclusion of the same obsolete words,
(2) the lack of some words of science and technology,
(3) the lexical division between technical words and names of plants (the
latter are assiduously collected in the dictionary),
(4) the exclusion of proper names and words derived from them,
(5) the exclusion of the participles which are included in the modern dictionary,
(6) the inclusion of many compound words which are spelt as a word (if they are written separately, they are excluded), and
(7) the lack of abbreviations as head words.
Despite the similarities, they are radically different in their total number of the entry words, their manner of definition and the use of illustrative
sentences. From these facts, it may safely be assumed that Picard used Johnson's dictionary or some other Johnsonian dictionary as a source book, reduced about twenty percent of the original entries, and transformed an academic English-
English dictionary to a popular English-Dutch dictionary.
The structure of Picard's dictionary proves to be of vital importance because it was a source book of Hori's Eiwa-Taiyaku-Syuchin-Jisyo (A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Language, 1862), which was the first full-scale
English-Japanese dictionary. Hori's dictionary, which was used in Japan for
about thirty years, not only played a prominent role in the early history of
English-Japanese lexicography, but also determined the course of its development. For example, the lack of technical terms in the dictionary caused the emergence of a variety of technical and academic glossaries in some fields of scientific disciplines around 1870.