When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech
copious without order, and energetick without rules: 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 rules 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.