O MAKE DICTIONARIES,' said Dr. Johnson, 'is dull work.' Be that as it may, I the job does call for assiduous reading, and on occasion the blear-eyed lexicographer falls victim to various natural phenomena--among them, somnolence. Then, perchance, bomnus dormitat Homerus. A case in point is the treatment, by several of our most authoritative dictionaries, of the homely, commonplace, and once household word: middlings. Middlings is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the 'trade name for the middle one of three classes into which goods are sorted according to quality.' The word is used, according to the OED, of fullers' teasels, of flour or meal, and, in the United States, of that part of a hog between the hams and shoulders. In the United States, too, says the OED, middlings is applied to a middle grade of cotton, and a quotation from a newspaper of I881 bears out the statement. The application is also.documented by a sentence from one of George Washington's letters: 'The middlings and Ship-stuff may be sold to answer the money calls which you will have upon you.' The Dictionary of American English defines middlings as 'medium sized particles sifted out of ground grain as it passes through the bolters.' It adds that the word may also be used of pork and cotton. Another entry says that the word is applied at times to 'tobacco of an intermediate grade.' Documenting this latter meaning is the same sentence from Washington: 'The middlings and Ship-stuff may be sold to answer the money calls which you will have upon you.' The Dictionary of Americanisms, after registering the application of middlings to pork and cotton, makes this entry: 'Tobacco or timber of an intermediate grade.' James Fenimore Cooper is quoted in support of the latter of the two senses given, and the quotation from Washington appears once more as evidence that middlings may refer to tobacco.' The facts in the matter seem to be (i) that middlings was first used, whether in England or the United States, to designate the coarser parts of ground