Bailey, with John Kersey the younger, was a pioneer of English lexicography, and changed the scope of dictionaries of the language. Greater comprehensivity became the common ambition. Up to the early eighteenth century, English dictionaries had generally focused on "hard words" and their explanation, for example those of Thomas Blount and Edward Phillips in the generation before. With a change of attention, to include more commonplace words and those not of direct interest to scholars, the number of headwords in English dictionaries increased spectacularly. Innovations were in the areas of common words, dialect, technical terms, and vulgarities. Thomas Chatterton, the literary forger, also obtained many sham-antique words from reading Bailey and Kersey.