Lexicographer

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A lexicographer is a person devoted to the study of lexicography, especially an author of a dictionary.

Samuel Johnson, himself a lexicographer, defined a lexicographer as "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words". However Jonathon Green, in Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (1996) suggests that this was a piece of eighteenth century politeness, and that a clearer indication of Johnson's view is given a little later in the same text where he says "Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he had not . . . studied the lexicons, yet he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman competently wise in his mother dialect only".

[edit] Notable lexicographers

Main article: List of lexicographers