tell me who WHO? who wrote the book of words
The Oxford English Dictionary, like the English language, is alive and well — and in a constant state of change
The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest book ever written. Despite two editions and many revisions, it will never be completed because we — all of us — are the finicky authors who refuse to stop using the English language in new and interesting ways
Samuel Johnson once said a dictionary should aim to “not form, but register” the language. Indeed, a dictionary should “not teach men how they should think,” he continued, “but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts.”
We tend to think of our dictionaries as tools of instruction; as books that set the standard, with a certain air of the definitive, for how our words ought properly to be used. But that was never the intention. The great lexicographers understood that the ideal campaign of a worthy dictionary was descriptive, not prescriptive. It would simply record what we’ve already agreed upon socially. It would, like the English language, live and breathe and change.
Language changes more quickly than ever. Its mutations spread at broadband speeds, as usage adapts in an instant to the changing demands we place on it. New words emerge overnight and become common currency almost as soon as they’re uttered; old words fall into swift and seemingly permanent obsolescence, discarded as the world develops and our needs evolve. In the face of such advancement, a nimble and responsive dictionary is more essential than ever. It isn’t a relic. It’s a cultural imperative.
Of all dictionaries, none looms more imposingly than the Oxford English Dictionary, or the OED. It stands as a monument — the great colossus of Victorian scholarship and human endeavour. It seems rather definitive, in its scope and erudition, its breadth of research and hardwon wisdom. But as its history and evolution make apparent, the OED remains a testament most of all to the dictionary’s endless sensitivity to change.
“The OED, more so than any other dictionary, encompasses the entire history of the modern English language,” writes Ammon Shea, in the introduction to his laborious undertaking Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. “By doing so it also encompasses all of English’s glories and foibles, the grand concepts and whimsical conceits that make our language what it is today.”
The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the one Shea read, published in 1989, contains more than 59 million words, spread across 20 volumes, in text so small that when you bought a copy, once upon a time, booksellers threw in a magnifying glass. The sheer size of the OED made Shea’s exhaustive account — a “thinking person’s Cliffsnotes to the greatest dictionary in the world” — an equally daunting and irresistible venture.
Of course, Shea’s conceit is interesting precisely because the OED was never meant to be read all the way through. It was never intended to be consumed, page by page, from beginning to end. Works of reference are designed for consultation: You pick up the phone book or the encyclopedia or the farmer’s almanac because you want to locate some specific article of information, swiftly retrieved before the volume is returned to its place on the shelf.
But the extraordinary scale and density of the OED in particular is unparalleled. As Shea explains of the word “artolater” (“a worshipper of bread”), “if you were to open the OED at random, there is about a 0.0046 chance that the page you are looking at will have artolater on it.” The OED is so huge, so comprehensive, that most of us are unlikely to experience more than a fraction of it.
The idea of making an entirely new dictionary, from scratch, was first proposed by The Philological Society of London on the Jan. 7, 1858. The publication of the OED’S first edition was celebrated with a dinner on June 6, 1928 — 70 years of diligent, arduous work later. It’s no modest enterprise, working on one thing for 70 years. It becomes more than a labour: It’s a pilgrimage, a quest.
Those who completed this quest were understandably confident in the merits of the opus they had just taken almost three quarters of a century to produce. “The superiority of the Dictionary to all other English Dictionaries, in accuracy and completeness, is everywhere admitted,” boasted a marketing pamphlet for the first edition. “The Oxford dictionary is the supreme authority, and without a rival.” This wasn’t hubris.
Like many lexicographers, those who started work on the Oxford Dictionary in earnest had some rather delusional ideas about the magnitude of the project at hand. “I confidently expect that in about two years we shall be able to give our first number to the world,” reflected Herbert Coleridge, the dictionary’s first official editor, at the outset of the job. “Indeed, were it not for the dilatoriness of many contributors, I should not hesitate to name an earlier period.”
One of Coleridge’s first duties was to create a set of pigeon- holes to contain the materials for the dictionary. To give you an idea of how badly he’d misjudged the breadth of the work, the pigeon-holes he had built could hold 60,000 slips. (A slip is the small scrap of paper on which the words of the dictionary were defined with accompanying quotations.) He was shy by about a million and a half.
As the years and decades went on, the Philological Society went about the heavy-duty work of collecting material with a consistent esprit de corps. By 1879, a picture began to emerge of what the finished product might resemble: “Not fewer than ten volumes, each containing not less than 1600 pages,” ran a notice from the Society to delegates at the time.
From the vantage of an outsider, lexicography can look like tedious work. It is full of research, note- taking, scrupulous compilation. But the view of making a dictionary as a kind of extreme clerical drudgery fails to account for just how complex an operation it can be.
Take the word “set.” This little three-letter abomination is a lexicographical nightmare. “The language seems not to contain a more perplexing word than Set, which occupies more than two columns of Webster, and will probably fill three of our large quarto pages,” observed James Murray, one of the primary editors of the OED, when he was going through some of the initial notes for the entry in 1881. Even at this early stage, on first pass, the word was daunting. There were 51 senses of the verb, 83 phrases, with 134 divisions. The completed entry — completed 30 years after Murray was imposed by it — spans more than 18 pages of the OED, including 154 main divisions, with so many subdivisions within that each spans more than the entire alphabet.
“To even realize the labour spent upon a word like this,” an essay about the making of the dictionary from the time of its publication notes, “it would be necessary to see the material in its original undigested state; it is assuredly a case of ‘ had you seen these roads before they were made, you would hold up your hands and bless General Wade.’”
When the first edition of the OED was finally revealed in 1858, it spanned no fewer than “15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text,” writes the historian Simon Winchester, in his book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. “At long, long last,” he continues, “all 414,825 words that (had been) amassed and catalogued and listed and annotated and which were thus far in their sum reckoned to make up all that was then known of the English language, had now been fully and properly defined, their preferred and variant and obsolete spellings all listed, their etymologies all recorded, their pronunciations suggested, required, or demanded.”
But of course, the work was far from finished. In the decades that followed, the OED began, more swiftly than its creators no doubt would have preferred, to fall out of date. Words became obsolete; definitions evolved; the dictionary’s claim on being the most comprehensive work of its kind began to weaken.
Lexicography, naturally, is a job of constant or near-constant revision. The dictionary is a record, not only of the history of a language, but of how it is presently used. The dictionary people, indefatigable, not only have to keep this stuff upto-date, they also have to reckon with errors. Consider the word “bondmaid,” It means “a slave girl,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, listed as “archaic.” “All menial tasks like cleaning in temples and private households,” reads one of the example sentences, “were undertaken by bondmaids whose position was not high in the society.”
An intriguing word, if not one you’re likely to use very often. But when the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was completed and published, the word “bondmaid” was nowhere to be found. It had not been excluded deliberately. In fact its slip had fallen off a shelf and languished unseen behind a pile of books. The word would not enter the OED until a revision in 1933.
After several revisions, it was finally decided that the OED should be updated. Work began on an extensive supplement in late 1950s, and proceeded steadily for another 30 years. The official second edition of the OED — still the most current — was finally completed in the spring of 1989.
And, of course, the work continues. Since 1993, the OED has been in the process of being comprehensively revised — for the first time in its history. Rather than merely continuing to add to the OED, it is now being worked over and updated in a granular way, as many of the definitions published in the original edition in 1928 are being rewritten. In an updated preface to The Meaning of Everything, published last year, Winchester says that the revision team “are now approximately halfway through their efforts.” This generously assumes that the printed word will still be around by the time they finish. This generously assumes that civilization will be, too.
Fortunately, these days, the work of revision is primarily digital- first anyway. As you might expect, the OED is available online. It’s the same material, digitized, fully searchable, with additions being published every three months. Like the language itself — today more than ever — the process is ongoing, with change happening all the time.
As such, the dictionary remains indispensable. We need it. It’s critical as a resource for the curious and interested. It’s usefulness as an aid to clarity — to looking up even common words, to be sure one is using them accurately, with full understanding — cannot be undervalued. Anyone whose business it is to form sentences is practically obliged to refer to the dictionary on a daily basis. “Any self- respecting writer,” Kingsley Amis wrote of the OED before his death, “needs a copy to hand.”
In 1911, while the OED was still underway, two English writers and grammarians, H.W. and F.G. Fowler, edited the first edition of what was known as the Concise Oxford Dictionary, or COD — a less expensive, less unwieldy home dictionary that could be used and consulted and flipped through at leisure, without the bulk or attendant comprehensiveness of its cousin-in-progress. The Concise Oxford Dictionary took the Fowlers five years to write and edit; everything from the letter “s” to the letter “z” had to be written by them without reference to the OED material.
In his preface to the sixth edition, incumbent editor J. B. Sykes outlined what he felt were “the general aims of the dictionary.” He ensured that “the words, phrases, and meanings given are those current in the English of the present day — either in living use, or familiar through their occurrence in generally quoted literature of the past. The dictionary seeks to record what is found to exist in the educated use of modern English.” And indeed this gets at the heart of what the dictionary, particularly the Oxford, is all about.
The lexicographer Benjamin Martin, even earlier than Samuel Johnson, admitted that “the pretence of fixing a standard to the purity and perfection of any language is utterly vain and impertinent, because no language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state.” Thus we see that the idea was not to set out rules for usage. It was simply to look at how words were used, are used, are being used today.
The Oxford English Dictionary is history — but it is living history, sensitive to tremors of change and subtle variations of usage or meaning. The point of the dictionary, despite common misconception, has never been to instruct us in how we ought to use the English language. It takes for granted that we know, on the whole, how to use the English language better than a book could advise. Rather, the point is to describe how the language is used — to pin down, at least temporarily, the precise manner in which a word is used, and has been used in the past, and how it came to be used that way. The beauty of the book is the way that it portrays, not prescribes. What it portrays is the great collective campaign of communication — an effort of civilization to make us all authors of this monumental book.
This generously assumes that the printed word will still be around by the time they finish. This generously assumes that civilization will be, too.