This chapter sets out a history of the main developments in the lexicography of English as a standard language since around 1700. In practice, this means focusing first on Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), enormously influential on English-language lexicography well into the nineteenth century, and secondly on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), similarly influential on subsequent publications, whether in its first edition (OED1, 1884–1928), its main twentieth-century Supplement, or its gradually emerging reincarnation in revised form online (OED3, 2000–). Many dictionaries play an important constitutive or subsidiary role in the story, however, ranging from the dictionaries preceding Johnson, through those for English-language learners of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (most notably Cobuild, 1987), to those of non-English varieties of the standard such as Scots, Canadian, Australian, and others. This chapter discusses dictionaries produced in the UK and (to a lesser extent) the United States, reflecting the pervasive historical and cultural influence of England and the UK on English lexicography to date.