“The Dictionary People, The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary” by Sarah Ogilvie (published by Chatto & Windus)
A-Z spells serendipity for wordsmiths
But it’s a little painful to admit that when we do encounter a mysterious word these days – termagant, peonage, peculate, lickspittle, coffle, for instance – the quicker way to find its meaning is to use Google rather than get down the weighty Oxford English Dictionary from the shelf. Ideally, we logophiles – those people who love words – should really turn first to the book self-described as “An unsurpassed guide for researchers in any discipline to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world”.
In 1857, a proposal was put before the Philological Society, a London-based organisation devoted to the scholarly study of language, to address the deficiency of existing English language dictionaries. The plan called for the compilation of a “New English Dictionary” (as it would originally be named). In 1879, Oxford University Press agreed to publish the work.
The editor estimated that the entire dictionary would take ten years to complete, but when the first part was published in 1884 it covered only “A-ant”. Finally, in 1928, instead of 6400 pages in four volumes as originally planned, the dictionary culminated in ten volumes containing more than 250,000 main entries and almost 2 million quotations. Today’s Second Edition, published in 1989, fills 22,000 pages bound into 20 substantial volumes.
You could call the Oxford the last word in words, because it is widely accepted as the authority on English. If a newly minted word is approved for inclusion, then that is its seal of approval. Those 500.000-plus are constantly updated, and the latest to be added include flip-open, frustrator, steampunkish, sglods, blotchiness, neobank, Indo-jazz, inarguably, infringeable, amidase, Amia, hard ears, Bafumbira, flip screen, conk and pyrocumulus.
We have to say that several of them aren’t particularly attractive and they leave us lost for words, but there you go. Things change. And obviously the half a million already include many equally tough to take, words we’ve never seen before and probably will never see again. Words become obsolete too, such as mesotonic, vocalistic or phonotyper, to which we might unkindly say good riddance. These dead ’uns appear in the pages with a dagger sign.
Sarah Ogilvie’s new book caught our attention, partly due to its come-on tagline asking “What do three murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary”.
The Oxford wasn’t the first. Doctor Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” of 1755 was already a century old, and there had been Charles Richardson’s “A New Dictionary of the English Language” (1836-37) and John Ogilvie’s “The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language” (1847-1850). America and Europe had their dictionaries too.
A new collection in England was suggested by Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-86), who was the Dean of Westminster Abbey, along with Herbert Coleridge (1830-61) and Frederick Furnivall (1825-1910), the latter two being lawyers who had turned literary scholars. Their proposal to the London Philological Society in 1857 was for “an entirely new Dictionary; no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout”.
Coleridge became the first editor of the “New English Dictionary” but died after two years to be succeeded by Furnivall, who took over for 20 years. Furnivall was replaced in 1879 by London schoolmaster James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915). He combined school work and the dictionary, with his wife eventually insisting he rid the family home of its vast ever-growing accumlation of books and papers by building an iron shed in the garden.
This was nicknamed the Scriptorium, and when Murray moved to Oxford in 1884 to work solely on the dictionary, the family, eventually with 11 children, and the Scriptorium went with him. “Murray and his small team of editors laboured on the Dictionary for the next thirty years in dank and cold conditions, often wrapping their legs in newspaper to stay warm,” records Ogilvie, a lexicographer herself.
Perhaps her experience was a little similar when in 2014 she descended to the “silent, cold, musty-smelling” Dictionary Archives in the Oxford University Press basement: rows of steel shelves on rollers, brown acid-free boxes bulging with letters, millions of slips of paper tied in bundles with twine, and page proofs covered in small, precise handwriting.
Over 70 years between 1858 and 1928 a global appeal went out inviting the public to read the books that they had to hand, and to mail in examples of their local words and how particular ones were used. These volunteer “Readers” were told to write out the words and sentences on small individual 4×6-inch pieces of paper. The response was massive.
In addition, volunteers could help as Subeditors who sorted the slips chronologically and into senses of meaning. Specialists provided advice on the etymologies, meaning and usage of certain words. Most people worked for free but a few were paid.
Thus the Oxford contains not only the definition and pronunciation of words, but also brief quotations from printed texts illustrating each one in actual use, starting with its first known appearance in print. That first recorded citation is followed by a small number of additional quotations, in chronological order, showing the word in action over the subsequent centuries. This is what makes it a historical dictionary.
Ogilvie also discovered in the archives a black book the size of an average exercise book and tied with cream ribbon. Her heart stopped: this was James Murray’s address book with the names of the thousands of people who had volunteered to contribute to the dictionary. Not only where they lived but what they read and personal details such as their deaths, marriages and friendships. Also the books they had read and the number of slips they sent.
Two further address books belonging to Murray turned up and then, the following summer, in a box in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, three address books belonging to his predecessor as Editor, Frederick Furnivall. Ogilvie had found the Dictionary people. And it is our gain.
She put in long hard detective work for eight years tracking the lives of some 3000 contributors across the world in libraries, archives and personal collections in Oxford, Cambridge, London, New York, California, Scotland and Australia. Now it is possible to discover about those three murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter and the vegetarian vicar.
While experts were needed for what became one of the most famous books in the world, the contributions from the public were hugely important. By 1928, an extraordinary 414,825 entries had been received from a surprising and diverse group of people – polymaths and eccentrics, specialists and autodidacts of all kinds. They were archaeologists, astronomers, slayers, naturists, novelists, explorers, suffragists, homosexuals, pornographers, mentally ill, et al, even possible cannibals. Ogilvie brings to light those to whom we owe much of our appreciation of the range, beauty and history of the English language.