An image of the room in London where Samuel Johnson wrote the first dictionary of standard English is projected on one wall of the exhibition space. A recorded voice reflects on the circumstances which brought the dictionary into being; on Johnson’s personal relation to it; and on the nature of dictionaries in general. If language is a virus, as William Burroughs famously asserted, then Samuel Johnson’s top floor ‘dictionary-workshop’ was an intensive incubator for English. The piece questions the growing hegemony of English as an ‘international’ language, and is always presented in the language of the site where it is being exhibited.