Read the excerpt from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. Mádness. n.s. [from mad.] Distraction; loss of unde
rstanding; perturbation of the faculties. Why, woman, your husband is in his old tunes again: he so rails against all married mankind, so curses all Eve's daughters, and so buffets himself on the forehead, that any madness I ever yet beheld seemed but tameness and civility to this distemper. Shakesp. Merry Wives of Windsor. There are degrees of madness as of folly, the disorderly jumbling ideas together, in some more, some less. Locke. How does this dictionary entry differ from those of earlier dictionaries?
The way that <u>entries in old dictionaries differ from those of earlier dictionaries is that earlier</u> dictionaries do not include references to classical literature passages. This was used as a way to exemplify the use of the words in a given context. Nowadays, dictionaries (good quality ones) embed more practical examples and include sentences that show the use of terms in different contexts.
