A notable anniversary

   Today, 29 January, marks the anniversary, in 1884, of the publication of the first segment of what was then called the New English Dictionary — later the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  It was first published in paper-bound sections (“fascicles”) of 352 pages each (12 x 8 x 1”).  These sheaves of pages would eventually be bound together in hard covers as whole volumes — 12 in all in the first edition.

   The Dictionary was first conceived in 1858, as a project of the Philological Society of England.  It was another “imperial-scale” project undertaken with boundless optimism and energy by subjects of Queen Victoria.  The making of the Dictionary took 70 years, the complete first edition being published in 1928.

   The twelve volumes of the first edition comprised 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text.  All 414,825 words considered at the time to make up the English language were included — defined, with preferred and variant (and even obsolete) spellings listed, etymologies recorded, and pronunciations recommended.

   In addition, the history of the use of each word was traced by means of 1,827,606 illustrative quotations, complied from over 5 million citations submitted by thousands of volunteer readers.  (I’ll make a separate entry or two about these readers.)

   “Pastor, how do you know all this?” you may ask.  Well, the fascinating story of the Oxford English Dictionary is told by Simon Winchester in The Meaning of Everything (2003).  I’ve had the book sitting on my shelf for a while, and finally got around to it, and what a wonderful story it is.

   In 1998, Winchester had written a book (Sherry gave it to me for Christmas one year) about one of the sub-stories related to the OED in his The Professor and the Madman.  It told the story of William Chester Minor — an American, a surgeon in the United States Army who served during the Civil War.  After the war Minor traveled to London where eventually he killed a man.  He was tried and found “innocent by reason of insanity” (one of the first successful uses of the “insanity defense”).  He was nevertheless confined to a lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, where he became one of the volunteer readers for the Dictionary, and a particularly good one.

   These are both wonderful books — well-written and full of interesting characters.  I recommend them highly.

   Anyway, happy anniversary OED!

James A. H. Murray served as editor of the Dictionary for 36 years — during the most formative period of its production.  Here he is pictured in the “Scriptorium” that was built behind his home in Oxford.  On the walls are hundreds of pigeon-holes into which the citation slips were sorted and stored.