The rise of literacy among the general public, combined with the technical advances in the mechanics of printing and bookbinding, meant that for the first time, books, texts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers were widely available to the general public at a reasonable cost. In earlier times, books had been regarded with something approaching veneration, but by the mid-eighteenth century this was no longer the case. ( April 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary 'easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time'. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £250,000 in 2021. It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson.

English dictionary meaning of words