In the 18th century a rigid standard for British English emerged, resulting from the “enregisterment” of a variety of the language. The usage-based prescriptivism conveyed in pronouncing dictionaries, explicitly intended to represent the language of the upper classes, was both a vector for this process, and a consequence of it. Using categories such as “nostalgia”, “aestheticism”, and “functionalism” (Pullum, 2004), this study inventories the specific justifications present in the metadiscourse of four eighteenth-century dictionaries: Buchanan’s Linguae Britannicae Vera Pronunciatio, Kenrick’s New Dictionary of the English Language, Sheridan's General Dictionary of the English Language and Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. These four authors were outsiders, religiously, culturally, politically and/or socially at the margins of the society whose speech they sought to describe. They both reinforced a socially established norm, and also used more subjective criterai to evaluate possible pronunciations, subscribing to an abstract ideal of language. They thus contributed to the myth of an absolute, fed into “ideologies of correctness”(Mugglestone 2010), and helped create an artificial norm for English, determined by subjective criteria distinct from class and geographical origin.