The _New English Dictionary_ furnishes for the first time data from which the extent of the English word-store at any given period, and the direction and rapidity of its growth, can fairly be estimated. For this purpose the materials furnished by the older dictionaries are quite insufficient, on account of their incompleteness and unhistorical character. For example 100 pages of the _New English Dictionary_ (from the letter H) contain 1002 words, of which, as the dated quotations show, 585 were current in 1750 (though some, of course, were very rare, some dialectal, and so on), 191 were obsolete at that date, and 226 have since come into use. But of the more than 700 words--current or obsolete--which Johnson might thus have recorded, he actually did record only about 300. Later dictionaries give more of them, but they in no way show their status at the date in question. It is worth noting that the figures given seem to indicate that not very many more words have been added to the vocabulary of the language during the past 150 years than had been lost by 1750. The pages selected, however, contain comparatively few recent scientific terms. A broader comparison would probably show that the gain has been more than twice as great as the loss.
In the _Deutsches Wörterbuch_ of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm the scientific spirit, as was said above, first found expression in general lexicography. The desirability of a complete inventory and investigation of German words was recognized by Leibnitz and by various 18th-century scholars, but the plan and methods of the Grimms were the direct product of the then new scientific philology. Their design, in brief, was to give an exhaustive account of the words of the literary language (New High German) from about the end of the 15th century, including their earlier etymological and later history, with references to important dialectal words and forms; and to illustrate their use and history abundantly by quotations. The first volume appeared in 1854. Jacob Grimm (died 1863) edited the first, second (with his brother, who died in 1859), third and a part of the fourth volumes; the others have been edited by various distinguished scholars. The scope and methods of this dictionary have been broadened somewhat as the work has advanced. In general it may be said that it differs from the _New English Dictionary_ chiefly in its omission of pronunciations and other pedagogic matter; its irregular treatment of dates; its much less systematic and less lucid statement of etymologies; its less systematic and less fruitful use of quotations; and its less convenient and less intelligible arrangement of material and typography.