was there any such thing as a dictionary before Samuel Johnson?
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There had been several dictionaries written in Latin, English, French and Italian prior to Johnson. Benjamin Martin's Lingua Britannica Reformata (1749) and Ainsworth's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1737) are both significant, in that they define entries in separate senses, or aspects of the word. In English (among others) John Cowell's Interpreter, a law dictionary, was published in 1607, Edward Phillips' The new world of English words came out in 1658 and a dictionary of 40,000 words had been prepared in 1721 by Nathan Bailey, though none was as comprehensive in breadth or style as Johnson's.
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Buy a dictionary. Thats what it means.
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My favorite is free dictionary. http://www.thefreedictionary.com\nThey even have widgets for use with firefox and IE. \nYahoo!toolbar also has a good dictionary under reference.
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just find the dictionary.
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The Oxford English Dictionary is the largest dictionary of any language in the world.  It contains approximately 1.5 million entries and includes, arguably, every word used in English since about 1500.  Some entries, such as acersecomic, are of words that were used only once in the history of the language, but each word includes every meaning and shade of meaning the word has ever had along with representative quotations illustrating the meaning.
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how about look up dictionary in the thesaurus
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read the dictionary from cover to cover
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try leo it is quite a good dictionary and it is from the faculty of information technology of the technical university of munich:\n\nhttp://dict.leo.org/?searchLoc=-1&searchLocRelinked=-1&lp=ende&search=&lp=ende&lang=en
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check an online dictionary
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Frequently it is said that "Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, first printed in 1604, is. . .the first fully developed representative of the monolingual dictionary in English." http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html\n(which also has a copy of this "table")\n\nBut even before that, in 1596, Edmund Coote published The English Schoolmaster.   In fact, about half of Cawdrey's dictionary was lifted straight from Coote!\n\nNote that both of these were lists of HARD English words with simple definitions. The first attempt at a COMPLETE English dictionary (not just of hard words) was Nathaniel Bailey's 1730 work, Dictionarium Britannicum. With 48,000 words it served as the standard English dictionary until Samuel Johnson's 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, which used Bailey as its base.
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Dictionary.com and Wiktionary
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Go to www.langenberg.com&#92; and around half the way down the selection area on the left is the word dictionary. Click it and go down a bit and you have a bunch of rhyming dictionary along with many other types of useful dictionaries.
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Iambic pentameters. Check it out on Wikipedia or google or something. By the way, it's not Old English. Old English is hundreds of years earlier.
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http://dictionary.reference.com/
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A few specialized dictionaries here
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I actually never owned encyclopedias...the dictionary went to the garbage dump years ago though.
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Go to this site:\nhttp://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=dictionary&submitform=Search\nand click on Dictionary.com