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The Word on Words

by

Lauren Roberts

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It spanned 70 years and 15,490 pages of single-printed text. There were 414,825 words supported with 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. A total of 227,779,589 letters and numbers occupied 178 miles of type. It was the first Oxford English Dictionary, the largest, most famous and most detailed dictionary still in use.

Simon Winchester is among the best nonfiction writers today—in my opinion. I enjoy revisiting his books as much as I enjoyed the first reading. Which is why I have spent much of my free time last week curled up with my favorite  Pomegranate White Tea and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press; 2003). The laundry didn’t get done, and cooking was minimal, but it was an extravagant, satisfying time.

What made it so good is that Winchester takes this everyday object, this one an object (for which I have a great affection) and turns it inside out, wringing out a history so compelling that you cannot help but wonder why no one explored it before.

Language has always been a part of human existence, but it wasn’t until 1842 when the first inklings of what became the OED began with the organization of the Philological Society, an organization of wealthy and leisured men with interest and expertise in language and etymology. A few years later, its Unregistered Words Committee presented the proposal that a dictionary of the English language in its totality was needed: “. . .  a wholly new dictionary that would give, in essence and in fact, the meaning of everything.”

Looking at that statement, it seems surprising that no one suspected the unimaginably complex and onerous task that was being proposed in a ten-year timeframe. Work began in 1860, but it wasn’t until the third editor—James Murray—came aboard in 1879 that the floundering, misshapen project finally began to take shape.

Murray, 38, a former bank clerk, respected teacher, enthusiastic omnivore of knowledge and experiences, came in contact with the Philological Society and soon thereafter expressed interest in the project. His appointment literally saved the dictionary.

It was a good thing that he had both fervor and organizational skills, for his first encounter with the nearly two million slips—small pieces of paper which contained quotations from nearly 20 years’ worth of volunteer reading of books, newspapers, journals, railway timetables, technical manuals, navigational almanacs and collections of belle letters that would form the basis for defining words—was appalling and revealing. Some were damaged or destroyed, others missing; some readers had died and many others had lost interest.

To begin to appreciate the sheer amount of work involved, one need only look at this part of the process, an appreciably overwhelming one. First, Murray sent out fresh appeals on both sides of the Atlantic for new volunteer readers. He redesigned the slips to uniform size that that their sorting would be easier. He sent out books and assignments, and when there were questions or problems, he followed up with letters (handwritten twice so that he always had a copy).

After their arrival—nearly 1,000 arrived every day—each slip would be examined for serious error, and then sorted into alphabetical order of their headwords. Then each headword spelled the same way was sorted into their different parts of speech (lie as a falsehood and lie as in lie down) after which they were arranged so that their quotations were in chronological order.

The most crucial step involved determining the various ways in which the words had been used over the centuries. This was the heart of the dictionary, and for important words, there might be several hundred quotations, each of which had to be checked for accuracy. Next, all slips connected with one category of meaning would be attached with a pin to a paper that showed a first attempt at a definition.

Finally, these bundles made their way to Murray who might make further subdivisions, add the etymology of each word and its alternate spellings, suggest its best pronunciation and then write for each word, sense and meaning, its definition, not an easy thing for, as Winchester notes, “The definition must be written to show what the thing signified by the word is, and not what it is not.”

Throughout the story which follows the dictionary’s evolution past Murray’s death, through its 1928 publication and beyond, Winchester’s eye for detail and for describing that detail in the most enthralling style endows this book with a richness that can capture even a non-enthusiast. The story of this dictionary is the story of human interaction with language, one that will never be completed but whose history is well worth knowing.

Some dictionary oddities:

A dictionary, according to the OED, is “a book dealing with the individual words of a language . .  . their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of these facts . . . ”

Noah Webster spent 36 years writing An American Dictionary of the English Language; he also mortgaged his house to finance the second edition of it.

A dictionary isn’t necessarily telling you that the first spelling it gives is preferred. Instead, it gives you spellings that are equally acceptable such as “maven” and “mavin.”

The Latin word dictum (“the thing said”) from which the word “dictionary” derives means an authoritative and positive utterance. But no one dictionary can be considered definitive. Dictionaries merely present the set of choices its lexicographers made. They are not authorities as much as guidelines that make our use of language more precise.

An “idioticon” is a dictionary of words used in a single region.

A 1999 survey of 25,500 standard English-language dictionary words found that 93 percent of them had been registered as dot-coms.

A dictionary achieved super-stardom during the late 1960s when it became a running gag on television’s Laugh-In  as in “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnell’s!”
 

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
 
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