Johnson’s friend Dr. William Adams marveled that Johnson expected to finish compiling his great dictionary in three years; Adams pointed out that it had taken the French Academy’s forty members forty years to compile the French dictionary (in fact, it had taken the French Academy fifty-five years). Johnson was said to have replied: “Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”