that its meaning is apparently determined by the tract and tenour 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
unskilful perusers appear only to repeat the same sense, will often
exhibit, to a more accurate examiner, diversities of significations, or,
at least, afford different shades of the same meaning: one will show the
word applied to persons, another to things; one will express an ill,
another a good, and a third a neutral sense; one will prove the
expression genuine from an ancient author; another will show it elegant
from a modern: a doubtful authority is corroborated by another of more
credit; an ambiguous sentence is ascertained by a passage clear and
determinate: the word, how often soever repeated, appears with new
associates, and in different combinations, and every quotation
contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
When words are used equivocally, I receive them in either sense; when
they are metaphorical, I adopt them in their primitive acceptation.