as employed in the cultivation
of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected;
suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild
exuberance; resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion: and exposed
to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech
copious without order, and energetic without rule: wherever I turned
my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be
regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any
established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected,
without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be
rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of
classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar, I applied
myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be of
use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time
the materials of a dictionary, which, by degrees, I reduced to
method, establishing to myself, in the progress of the work, such as
experience and analogy suggested to me; experience, which practice and
observation were continually increasing; and analogy, which, though in
some words obscure, was evident in others.

In adjusting the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time
unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those
irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval
with it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later
writers has produced. Every language has its anomalies, which though
inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated
among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be
registered, that they may not be increased; and ascertained, that
they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise
its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the
lexicographer to correct or proscribe.

As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary
or common use were spoken before they were written; and while they
were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great
diversity, as we now observe those who cannot read to catch sounds
imperfectly, and utter them negligently. When this wild and barbarous
jargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endeavored to
express, as he co