Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.. New York: Knopf 2023. Print.
It was in a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement, where the Dictionary's archive is stored, that I opened a dusty box and came across a small black book tied with a cream ribbon....Perhaps those ghosts were guiding me because the discovery I made that day would lead me on an extraordinary journey.
Description:
Author Ogilvie, upon this discovery as well as a photo collection of contributors collected by the OED's creator and first editor Frederick Furnivall, decided to research these OED contributors, some of whom had sent in over 100,000 word entries to be considered for inclusion in the dictionary. Who were these people? Why did they work so hard reading obscure books to discover uncommon words? And what was the process these words had to go through until they could be part of the OED?
Those questions were enough to hook Ogilvie to spend eight years wading through this trove of names and perusing letters, articles, photographs, and scribbled notes, along with "censuses, marriage registers birth certificates, and official records" to unravel the backgrounds of these people and their relationship to the OED and its editor Murray.
The OED was conceived to be "the first dictionary that described language....[and] would trace the meaning of words across time and describe how people were actually using them." To gather these words and the sentences that contained them, the original editors "crowdsourced" the project between 1858-1928, placing advertisements for volunteer readers in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and through popular literary clubs and societies like the Philological Society, which became the underwriter of the OED's expenses. Most readers worked for free, simply desiring to just be a part of this important, historic project.
The Dictionary People could also be cranky, difficult, and eccentric...but that, paradoxically, also makes them lovable , or at least fascinating.
Slips of 4 x 6 paper were sent to contributors for them to record interesting words on the slip, along with the book where each was found, and a sentence that contained the word that would illustrate its usage. These slips were then gathered by sub-editors (often Murray's own family members - he had 11 children), alphabetized and placed in chronological order in the workspace named the "Scriptorium." Editors then created definitions, checked for earlier references of each word, and gathered the finished words into the specific dictionary section/letter currently under development. These sections were published as they were developed, until the final letters were completed and all could be compiled into one vast book.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the launch of a "uniform penny post" and the birth of steam power (driving printing presses, and leading to railway transport and faster ocean crossings) enabled this system of reading for the dictionary to be so successful...[creating] the conditions for a global, shared, intellectual project.
Here are a few examples of the OED contributors whom Ogilvie discovered, and then placed in chapters arranged alphabetically by the person's distinguishing profession (or quirk) for The Dictionary People:
- Archaeologist - Margaret Alice Murray, a nurse living in India, focused on books of that culture until she became an Egyptologist at age 31, and wrote her own autobiography at age 100 titled, My First Hundred Years;
- Best Contributor - Thomas Austin Jnr, who sent in 165,061 words. Second place went to William Douglas (151,982 words);
- Explorer - Sir John Richardson, surgeon for John Franklin's ill-fated three-year voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, an undertaking where most of the men starved to death or resorted to cannibalism;
- "Hopeless" Contributors (so noted in the address book) - Those people who requested books to read and slips to fill out, then never sent in any contributions, often keeping the valuable, old books;
- Lunatics - John Dormer, "one of Murray's most faithful Subeditors and Readers," was an inmate at the Croydon Mental Hospital psychiatric institution. (Note: Three of the top four OED contributors were in mental asylums. "Lunatic" was, in 1871, a defining term the US Census, along with "Dear and Dumb or Blind, Imbecile or Idiot.");
- New Zealander - W. Herbert-Jones, a wildly popular speaker about New Zealand, (complete with the new invention of projected slides), contributed many words from that country, although he had never visited New Zealand and the information he presented to audiences was completely made up;
- Zealots - James Murray, overall editor of the OED, who had left school at 14, but nonetheless learned twenty-five languages
Contributors could select the books of their own interest to scour for interesting words. Author Ogilive sneaks in some examples of these words submitted which are fascinating in their own right. Here are some words submitted by William Douglas (another member of the asylum "lunatics") from Robert Knox's System of Human Anatomy, taken from the staggering 1,600 words he turned in from that book alone.
- aphasic - "having lost the power of speech"
- buccinator- "a muscle of the wall of the cheek"
- occipitofronalis - "a muscle of the scalp
- ozyat - "an obsolete drink of almond and orange-flower water"
One interesting finding out of the myriad of discoveries Ogilive unlocked was the three words with the most "senses" (definitions). These are "Run" (654 senses), Go (603 senses) and Take (586 senses). Incredible.
When finally completed and published in 1928, the Oxford English Dictionary, contained "400,000 words, 15,000 pages of literature, 2,000,000 quotations, and 178 miles of type." Peoople still contribute slips of words to update the OED, including Chris Collier who sent in over 100,000 words between 1975 to 2010, taken solely from the local newspaper, the Brisbane Courier-Mail. Ogilive tracked him down in Australia and talked with him about his contribution. He was a reclusive sort, hording a vast collection of movie posters and taken to mowing his lawn and walking the streets at midnight ...naked,
I found myself totally absorbed into this mid-nineteenth century world of dedicated, tireless, scholarly (and sometimes quirky) people who built the OED. I simply could not get enough details about who these people were and how many had voluntary devoted their lives to this project. I highly recommend The Dictionary People for anyone interested in language, people, and the world of the 1800s.
But what united [readers] was their startling enthusiasm for the emerging Dictionary, their ardent desire to document their language, and, especially for the hundreds of autodidacts, the chance to be associated with a prestigious project attached to a famous university which symbolized the world of learning from which they were otherwise excluded.
[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]
Author Winchester unravels the bizarre, true history of James Murray, the director of The Oxford English Dictionary, when he discovered that one of his most prolific contributors of new words for the OED was currently committed to an asylum for the criminally insane..
Happy reading.
Fred
(along with an Introduction to The First Sentence Reader)
