A Grammar of the English Tongue

In 1755, the same year he revolutionized lexicography with his monumental Dictionary, Samuel Johnson turned his formidable mind to the very foundations of English itself. This Grammar represents Johnson's attempt to impose order on a language that had long resisted systematic rule-making, blending prescriptive authority with genuine curiosity about how English actually worked. Written in Johnson's characteristic prose, rigorous, opinionated, and surprisingly witty, it tackles orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody with the confidence of a man who believed language could be mastered through careful study. The book reveals Johnson's phonetic sensitivities and his prescient recognition that spelling and pronunciation had begun to drift apart, a problem that would only intensify over centuries. Yet what emerges is not dry pedantry but a living engagement with English as Johnson found it: irregular, stubborn, and endlessly fascinating. For anyone curious about where our grammatical assumptions come from, or how English came to be organized as it is, this text offers a remarkable window into the moment when the language's rules were still being argued over, and written down.