How is Johnson's approach innovative?

• A. He studies the diction of everyday speech.
• B. He defines literary and poetic terms.
• C. He relies on the credibility of established authors.
• D. He uses phonetic spellings to standardize pronunciation.

Answer: (C)

Johnson’s innovation sits in grounding dictionary definitions in the authority of established authors, and backing each sense with quotations from those authors. By drawing on a wide range of respected writers to illustrate usage, he treats language as something proven and explainable through literary evidence rather than just his own judgment. This gives the dictionary greater credibility and shows how a word’s meaning and proper usage appear across different texts and time periods. Other approaches—like focusing on everyday speech, merely defining literary terms, or using phonetic spellings to fix pronunciation—don’t capture this distinctive move: using esteemed literary authority to validate definitions and demonstrate real-world usage.