What is arguably "the greatest enterprise of its kind in the history of scholarship'? Establishing the periodic table of the elements? Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs via the Rosetta stone? The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem?
The OED is after all an effort to identify, define, and illustrate every single word in the English language from the earliest Anglo-Saxon with its borrowings from Celtic, Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and Irish, through the incorporation of Latin in the 400-year Roman occupation, with Norse arriving from Scandinavia, and Norman French after 1066, up to and including words invented and borrowed yesterday.
The first edition of the OEC published in 1928 contained 414,825 words,1,827,306 illustrative quotations, and 15,490 pages of singe-spaced printed text. Although the original scholars thought it might take seven, maybe ten years to create, it took 67 years.
Simon Winchester's popular history The Meaning of Everything is The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was published in 2003, but it remains as lively and fresh as the day it rolled off the Oxford University Press's press.
Winchester, a British writer, journalist and broadcaster, was born in north London in 1944. His website says that though not Catholic he was educated first at a boarding convent in Bridport, Dorset and later at Hardye’s School, Dorchester, Dorset. He went up to Oxford in 1963, to read geology at St. Catherine’s College. There he became involved in the University Exploration Club, and was the member of a six-man sledding expedition onto an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice-cap in 1965. He worked as field geologist in Uganda, on an offshore oil rig in the North Sea, and switched to journalism in 1967 where he stayed.
He became a foreign correspondent of the Guardian and the Sunday Times and was based in Belfast, New Delhi, New York, London, and Hong Kong. In 1998 he published The Professor and the Madman, a book about the editor of the OED and a forgotten American player. "Although his publishers had little initial hope for the book – ordering an initial very modest print run of some 10,000 copies – it happened . . . to sell millions of copies, and remains in print today . . . . " He went on to write more than 30 books.
The Meaning of Everything is just what the subtitle says it is, the story of the OED, how it came about, the main characters involved in its creation (only the "main" figures because hundreds of people from around the world contributed illustrative quotations), and the challenges involved—financial, scholarly, logistical, political. No one at the beginning had any idea of what the project would entail or its ultimate cost. If they had, they would have smothered the OED in its cradle. By the time it became clear that the editors were creating an immense edifice, the OED had become a subject of national pride, a symbol of Victorian England's mastery of the world.
Along the way, Winchester gives a brief history of English and of dictionary-making (America's Webster was a competitor). He sketches the personalities of key figures. Frederick Furnivall "was sufficiently dedicated to the sport [of sculling], and with his inherited fortune insulating him from the need to pay too much attention to legal work, that he took time to design a special outrigger for his boat, to form sculling clubs, to inveigh against clubs that forbade working men from taking part, and, most vocally of all, to protest against the then general ban on allowing women on the water."
The book includes contemporary photographs, an index, and the footnotes are worth the price of admission: "Murray [the OED's editor] very nearly included by mistake the noun alliterates, which a reader came across in an essay by the American poet James Lowell. Lowell wrote in answer to a puzzled Murray—who could find no other citation—saying it was clearly a misprint for illiterates. The verb alliterate—meaning to constitute alliteration—does of course exist." As I said, this is a book for word people.
The second edition of the OED was published in 1989, a year after the first electronic version became available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. Wikipedia says the third edition—necessary because the language continues to adopt and invent new words—will most likely appear only in electronic form; the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely it will ever be printed.
None of this diminishes Winchester's delightful book. It's a portmanteau of words—look it up.
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