Who made up the dictionary? Surely they just arranged random letters and called them words?

Question: Who made up the dictionary? Surely they just arranged random letters and called them words?
- Keywords:
  dictionary
Asked by emma014442 to Arttu, Ceri, James_M on 23 Jun 2011.
- James M Monk answered on 23 Jun 2011:
  
  You usually hear that Samuel Johnson made the first English dictionary, but I’m not sure if there might have been others doing it and he is just the most famous (this happens quite a lot – someone gets credited with doing something, when really there were many people working along similar lines).
  
  Up until that point there would have been no standardised spelling (and in fact standardised would have been spelt standardi*z*ed back then!). I don’t know if he carried out surveys to see which were the most popular spellings of words, or just used whatever he felt was best. Probably a bit of both.
  
  English and English spelling is constantly changing.

Question: Who made up the dictionary? Surely they just arranged random letters and called them words?