Recent research has, in fact, called the whole neat narrative of lexicography into question by complicating the story. The origins of dictionaries have been taken further back than Cawdrey by the research carried out by Jürgen Schäfer into some 600 renaissance glossaries. Schäfer argues that most compilers of hard words dictionaries had gathered these words from earlier monolingual glossaries rather than merely anglicizing the lemmas of bilingual dictionaries, and so these words were not just 'dictionary' words but had a basis in real usage.

An example of such a glossary that was heavily used is Thomas Speght's glossary to his edition of Chaucer that was appended to the 1598 edition, revised and enlarged for the 1602 edition, reprinted in 1687 and eventually superseded by Thomas Thomas's glossary to Urry's edition of Chaucer in 1721. From Cawdrey's second edition (1609) to Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) the majority of lexicographers used this glossary. Borrowings from Speght represent the tradition of the Spenserian revival of Old English, so one could argue that these Chaucerian words are part of the living, changing language at that time.

An example of the way in which our view of the development of the language has been changed by this acknowledgement of the part glossaries had to play in it is shown by the verb 'to fermentate'. The OED, before its current re-editing, gave the first citation from Blount's Glossographia (1656), a typical 'hard words' dictionary. But the entry is in Cawdrey:

fermentated, leauened

who had in turn taken it from A. M.'s glossary to Oswald Gaebelkhover's The Booke of Physicke (1599)

fermentated, read leauened p. 209

and the passage glossed reads:

he caused 6lb. of rye meale to be fermentated with sower leaven and therein he bathed himself.

Schäfer's argument is that early dictionary-makers did not simply wilfully invent their lemmas, but tried to record contemporary usage, and, of course, in doing this, they made use of any existing glossaries and dictionaries that might help them with the definitions.

Johnson is following this tradition of lexicographic practice when he makes use of glossaries such as Cruden's Concordance to the Bible or Hanmer's glossary to the works of Shakespeare.