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I've always taken the existence of a comprehensive English dictionary for granted. It's the sort of invention that, now we're so used to it, feels both inevitable and obvious - but of course, it was neither, and the story of how it came into existence fills me with a similar kind of awe as I feel when I remember that the pyramids were built without modern machinery.
Before the OED, English dictionaries were slapdash books, focused mainly on rare words that authors thought their readers would find difficult or interesting. In the mid-19th century, the London Philological Society arrived at the idea of a dictionary that covered all words. They had no idea how huge the initiative would become: early predictions had the whole thing completed in just a couple of years, but the first fascicle (A to Ant) wasn't published until 1884, nearly 30 years after work began. Their method relied on an army of volunteers who undertook to read the entire corpus of English literature and copy out quotes illustrating the use of all the words they encountered. They sent these quotes on individual slips of paper to the dictionary staff, who sorted the slips first alphabetically, then chronologically, then by nuance of meaning, then by fitness for purpose. Editors would draft definitions for each word, using the quotes to show its first recorded use and the evolution of its meaning over time. I doubt anyone who has ever met an editor needs telling just how long it could take to finalise a single definition, or how contentious the process could get. But in 1928, the first edition of the Dictionary was finally complete, freeing the team to immediately begin revising it. As far as I can tell, the work has been ongoing ever since.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is a novel slipped between the pages of history. Esme is a fictional assistant's daughter at the very real Scriptorium where the real Dr James Murray and his team worked on the OED. From a young age she becomes obsessed with words, and with the powerful transformation that occurs when they're plucked from the verbal aether and solidified in print. Her story is a feminist bildungsroman: raised in a loving bubble of clumsy but well-intentioned support within the stiflingly chauvinistic world of late Victorian philology, she becomes keenly aware that the Dictionary's perspective on the English language is heavily skewed along gender and class lines - that countless speakers, historically and in her own time, lacked the means or education to leave a record of their speech that would meet the dictionary's criteria for inclusion. She starts to collect words for her own, private dictionary: the working-class jargon of the Murrays' maid, Lizzie; colourful obscenities from Mabel, an impoverished former sex worker now scrounging the occasional coin as a junk seller at the local markets; the politically conscious language of her friend Tilda, an actress and militant suffragette.
It's a beautiful book, equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, brimming on every page with love for women and deep, respectful curiosity about our lives that have gone so largely unrecorded throughout history. The pacing is wonderfully natural, following the arhythmic ebbs and flows of a life that feels too lifelike to submit to any rigid story structure. Things happen for a while, and then they change as Esme moves on to something new; not all questions are answered and not every resolution is neat, but it’s all done in a thoughtful, intentional way that only helps make the story more vivid.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester is nonfiction, albeit sensationalised in places. It tells the story of Dr Minor, one of the OED’s notable volunteers, who contributed thousands of quotations while incarcerated in an insane asylum for the murder of a total stranger. Minor, a wealthy American army surgeon, suffered from what seems fairly recognisable in modern terms as schizophrenia but was at the time viewed as tragically incurable madness. His work on the Dictionary gave him a connection to the outside world and offered temporary distraction from the nightmarish world of paranoid delusions in which he passed much of the rest of his time.
For a lot of reasons it’s a very enjoyable book, full of fascinating details about the Dictionary, its editors and contributors. But I have to admit that the gusto with which Winchester tackled its more lurid elements gave me, as the kids are saying these days, the ick. Minor’s compulsive sexual behaviours and neuroses are a big part of his story, but I think they could have been faithfully conveyed without eroticising them the way Winchester chose to. At one point, when recounting a truly horrifying instance of sexual self-mutilation, he spins off into a sordid theory that Minor might have been carrying on an affair with his victim’s widow, for which he admits upfront there is zero evidence or even grounds for suspicion - my dude, why include it, then? Was the canonical autopenectomy not dramatic enough for you?
So, yeah. WEIRD VIBES. But I have to give the book credit for being well researched and extremely readable, and even if I don’t agree with all Winchester’s choices, I suppose I can see why he felt that this particular story - half stern lexicography, half miserable untreated mental illness - might need a bit of sexing up.
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner is fantastic, but misleadingly subtitled, I think. Only the first 40 pages are about Tolkien's work on the OED; the rest is a much more general treatment of his passion for philology, including a discussion of how words (not only in English) inspired his writing, and - the largest part of the book - a series of word studies on interesting usages or coinages from his work. It's all quite nitty-gritty and technical, and a fascinating window into the creative process of an author who cared as much about the mechanics of language as the narrative events of his stories.
One thing that especially struck me was the incredible depth and breadth of linguistic knowledge that lexicographers like Tolkien were drawing on for their work. These days, if you want to know the etymology of a word, you look it up in the OED; Tolkien's job was to figure out those etymologies from scratch, which relied on him knowing a whole bunch of old languages (and their literature) inside out. Amazing stuff.
Before the OED, English dictionaries were slapdash books, focused mainly on rare words that authors thought their readers would find difficult or interesting. In the mid-19th century, the London Philological Society arrived at the idea of a dictionary that covered all words. They had no idea how huge the initiative would become: early predictions had the whole thing completed in just a couple of years, but the first fascicle (A to Ant) wasn't published until 1884, nearly 30 years after work began. Their method relied on an army of volunteers who undertook to read the entire corpus of English literature and copy out quotes illustrating the use of all the words they encountered. They sent these quotes on individual slips of paper to the dictionary staff, who sorted the slips first alphabetically, then chronologically, then by nuance of meaning, then by fitness for purpose. Editors would draft definitions for each word, using the quotes to show its first recorded use and the evolution of its meaning over time. I doubt anyone who has ever met an editor needs telling just how long it could take to finalise a single definition, or how contentious the process could get. But in 1928, the first edition of the Dictionary was finally complete, freeing the team to immediately begin revising it. As far as I can tell, the work has been ongoing ever since.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is a novel slipped between the pages of history. Esme is a fictional assistant's daughter at the very real Scriptorium where the real Dr James Murray and his team worked on the OED. From a young age she becomes obsessed with words, and with the powerful transformation that occurs when they're plucked from the verbal aether and solidified in print. Her story is a feminist bildungsroman: raised in a loving bubble of clumsy but well-intentioned support within the stiflingly chauvinistic world of late Victorian philology, she becomes keenly aware that the Dictionary's perspective on the English language is heavily skewed along gender and class lines - that countless speakers, historically and in her own time, lacked the means or education to leave a record of their speech that would meet the dictionary's criteria for inclusion. She starts to collect words for her own, private dictionary: the working-class jargon of the Murrays' maid, Lizzie; colourful obscenities from Mabel, an impoverished former sex worker now scrounging the occasional coin as a junk seller at the local markets; the politically conscious language of her friend Tilda, an actress and militant suffragette.
It's a beautiful book, equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, brimming on every page with love for women and deep, respectful curiosity about our lives that have gone so largely unrecorded throughout history. The pacing is wonderfully natural, following the arhythmic ebbs and flows of a life that feels too lifelike to submit to any rigid story structure. Things happen for a while, and then they change as Esme moves on to something new; not all questions are answered and not every resolution is neat, but it’s all done in a thoughtful, intentional way that only helps make the story more vivid.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester is nonfiction, albeit sensationalised in places. It tells the story of Dr Minor, one of the OED’s notable volunteers, who contributed thousands of quotations while incarcerated in an insane asylum for the murder of a total stranger. Minor, a wealthy American army surgeon, suffered from what seems fairly recognisable in modern terms as schizophrenia but was at the time viewed as tragically incurable madness. His work on the Dictionary gave him a connection to the outside world and offered temporary distraction from the nightmarish world of paranoid delusions in which he passed much of the rest of his time.
For a lot of reasons it’s a very enjoyable book, full of fascinating details about the Dictionary, its editors and contributors. But I have to admit that the gusto with which Winchester tackled its more lurid elements gave me, as the kids are saying these days, the ick. Minor’s compulsive sexual behaviours and neuroses are a big part of his story, but I think they could have been faithfully conveyed without eroticising them the way Winchester chose to. At one point, when recounting a truly horrifying instance of sexual self-mutilation, he spins off into a sordid theory that Minor might have been carrying on an affair with his victim’s widow, for which he admits upfront there is zero evidence or even grounds for suspicion - my dude, why include it, then? Was the canonical autopenectomy not dramatic enough for you?
So, yeah. WEIRD VIBES. But I have to give the book credit for being well researched and extremely readable, and even if I don’t agree with all Winchester’s choices, I suppose I can see why he felt that this particular story - half stern lexicography, half miserable untreated mental illness - might need a bit of sexing up.
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner is fantastic, but misleadingly subtitled, I think. Only the first 40 pages are about Tolkien's work on the OED; the rest is a much more general treatment of his passion for philology, including a discussion of how words (not only in English) inspired his writing, and - the largest part of the book - a series of word studies on interesting usages or coinages from his work. It's all quite nitty-gritty and technical, and a fascinating window into the creative process of an author who cared as much about the mechanics of language as the narrative events of his stories.
One thing that especially struck me was the incredible depth and breadth of linguistic knowledge that lexicographers like Tolkien were drawing on for their work. These days, if you want to know the etymology of a word, you look it up in the OED; Tolkien's job was to figure out those etymologies from scratch, which relied on him knowing a whole bunch of old languages (and their literature) inside out. Amazing stuff.
