LEXICOGRAPHER

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".
Famous lexicographers include:

★ Francis Bacon

★ Katherine Barber

★ Julian Barnes (at a stretch)

★ Ambrose Bierce (at a stretch)

★ Thomas Blount

★ Henry Bradley

★ Peter Bowler

★ Robert Burchfield

★ Thomas Cooper

★ William Craigie

★ Vladimir Dal

★ Susie Dent

★ Henry Watson Fowler

★ Isaac Kaufmann Funk

★ Frederick James Furnivall

★ Hesychius of Alexandria

★ A. S. Hornby

★ Samuel Johnson

★ Pierre Larousse

★ María Moliner (Spanish)

★ James Murray

★ Sergei Ozhegov

★ Charles Talbut Onions

★ Eric Partridge

★ Josette Rey-Debove

★ Peter Mark Roget

★ John Simpson

★ J.R.R. Tolkien

★ John Walker

★ Noah Webster

★ Edmund Weiner

★ Delfín Carbonell Basset
''See also:'' List of lexicographers