it ought to be our endeavor to recall it, by
making our ancient volumes the groundwork of style, admitting
among the additions of later times, only such as may supply real
deficiencies, such as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue,
and incorporate easily with our native idioms.

But as every language has a time of rudeness antecedent to perfection,
as well as of false refinement and declension, I have been cautious
lest my zeal for antiquity might drive me into times too remote,
and crowd my book with words now no longer understood. I have fixed
Sidney's work for the boundary, beyond which I make few excursions.
From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might
be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the
language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of
the Bible, the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon, the phrases of
policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh, the dialect of poetry and
fiction from Spender and Sidney, and the diction of common life from
Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English
words in which they might be expressed.

It is not sufficient that a word is found, unless it be so combined
as that its meaning is apparently determined by the tract and tenor
of the sentence, such passages I have therefore chosen, and when
it happened that any author gave a definition of a term, or such
an explanation as is equivalent to a definition, I have placed
his authority as a supplement to my own, without regard to the
chronological order that is otherwise observed.

Some words, indeed, stand unsupported by any authority, but they are
commonly derivative nouns or adverbs, formed from their primitives by
regular and constant analogy, or names of things seldom occurring in
books, or words of which I have reason to doubt the existence.

There is more danger of censure from the multiplicity than paucity
of examples, authorities will sometimes seem to have been accumulated
without necessity or use, and perhaps some will be found, which
might, without loss, have been omitted. But a work of this kind is not
hastily to be charged with superfluities; those quotations, which to
careless or unskillful perusers appear only to repeat the same sense,
will often exhibit, to a more accurate examiner, diversities of
signification, or, at least, afford different shades of the same
meaning: one will show the word applied to persons,