‘The Greatest Enterprise of Its Kind’: The Oxford English Dictionary

Creating the OED was a mammoth undertaking that took half a century to compile

Volunteers compiled thousands of quotation slips to mail to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Owen Massey McKnight/Flickr/CC BY SA 2.0

On June 6, 1928, 150 men gathered for a formal dinner in London’s magnificent Goldsmiths’ Hall. In this glittering assembly of intellectuals were bishops, peers of the realm, publishers, writers, and professors, including one J.R.R. Tolkien, who had not yet attained world fame as the creator of “The Lord of the Rings.”

In his Prologue to “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” (Oxford University Press, 2003, 260 pages), Simon Winchester takes us back to that Wednesday night in June, where the diners feasted on smoked salmon, clear turtle soup, muscat salad, fine wines, and other gastronomical delights. Once they had partaken of these delicacies and toasts were offered to king and country, the men lit pipes or cigars and turned their attention to the evening’s principal speaker, the Right Honorable Stanley Baldwin, Britain’s prime minister.

Stanley Baldwin, 1923, Britain’s prime minister who commemorated the completion of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928. Public Domain

According to Winchester, Baldwin was the ideal candidate to deliver that evening’s address. He was “calm, taciturn, steady,” a conservative known for his love of reading and his carefully crafted public speeches. Among his remarks that evening were these thoughts:

“I have spoken at many dinners—I have never been allowed to dine without speaking—but I have never risen under such a feeling of oppression and depression as I do to-night, partly by the weight of learning in this room and partly by the weight of the toast which I have to propose. I am expected in a few words to do justice to the merits of Professor Craigie and his co-editor and the staff, of 15,000 pages of literature, of 400,000 words, of 3,000,000 quotations, and 178 miles of type.”

The prime minister concluded by saying: “There can be no worldly recompense—except that every man and woman in this country whose gratitude and respect is worth having, will rise up and call you blessed for this great work. The ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ is the greatest enterprise of its kind in history.”

Devoted Servants

The project that had so awed Prime Minister Baldwin and countless numbers of other people, which came to be called the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was first proposed in 1857 by the Philological Society of London. Dissatisfied with the dictionaries then in use, the Society envisioned a massive work that would act as a sort of survey of the English language as well as a complete collection of its words and their meanings.

In 1879, the Philological Society worked out an agreement with Oxford University Press to assume production of the dictionary. The bridge between the two organizations was James Murray (1837–1915), a largely self-educated member of the Society who served as the chief editor until his death. Several times this arrangement nearly fell apart, largely as a result of quarrels between Murray and his Oxford associates, but both sides persevered. Meanwhile, in a specially constructed room called the “scriptorium,” Murray meticulously assembled quotations and entries for the project.

Portrait of James Murray, 1894, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 until his death in 1915. Public Domain

Murray’s standards and methods of organization remained in place even after his death, and he was largely responsible for editing the first half of the dictionary. Joining him in 1888 as editor in this endeavor was Henry Bradley (1845–1923), who, though also largely self-educated, had become a leading philologist. He took command after Murray’s demise.

The third editor to take charge of this production was William Craigie (1867–1957), the gentleman mentioned in Baldwin’s speech. Joining him was Charles T. Onions (1873–1965), who later joked that he had brought the last entry, zyxt (obsolete for “seest thou”), to the dictionary.

The Years Drag Into Decades

When Murray first assumed control of the project, the estimated time for completion was 10 years. When after five years the lexicographers had only reached the word “ant,” it became clear that compiling the dictionary would take a bit longer than anticipated.

At least three factors accounted for this snail’s pace. The first had to do with the enormity of the work itself. This was to be no ordinary dictionary but a collection, as the title of Winchester’s history tells us, of “the meaning of everything.”

The technology of that age also slowed the work. Entries, quotations, and all the other intricacies of definition were largely recorded first by handwritten notation and then physically filed and stored. Furthermore, the reliance of Murray and his staff on volunteers to send them entries for consideration entailed heavy and ongoing correspondence through the mail. Information that today can be sent with a tap of the finger once consumed days or even weeks.

Finally, all the editors maintained stringent standards in their pursuit of this task. These men cut no corners, never sacrificed accuracy for haste. Whatever their differences in personality—Murray, for example, had a sharp temper while Bradley was more scholarly and reserved—all these editors were exacting and professional in the completion of their duties.

The Americans

In Chapter 7 of his history of the OED, titled “The Hermit and the Murderer,” Winchester notes the vital importance of the unpaid contributors to the dictionary. He then focuses our attention on two volunteers, both citizens of the United States then living in England, who went above and beyond the hoped-for submissions.

Sailing to India from Boston in search of his brother, who had left home, Fitzedward Hall survived a shipwreck in the Bay of Bengal, washed ashore, and decided to stay put. Over the next  years, he learned several languages, translated Indian texts into English, married, and went with his wife to England. Though he became a professor of Sanskrit, he was soon embroiled in controversy with other philologists, was accused of being a drunkard and a spy, left London, and spent the next 32 years in self-imposed exile in a remote English cottage.

For over two decades, Hall wrote almost daily to Murray and the scriptorium with entries, suggestions, explanations, and corrected proofs. Murray and his helpers became heavily dependent on Hall, to whom Murray once wrote “to express with trembling the earnest desire that you will be able to give us your help for a long time to come.”

William Chester Minor’s case was stranger still. A former surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War, Minor was later dismissed from service for his eccentric behavior. His family sent him to England in hopes he might recover his mental health, but in 1872 he murdered a working man—a stranger—and was committed to Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane.

William Chester Minor, a retired U.S. Army surgeon and Broadmoor patient, contributed some 12,000 quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary over the course of 20 years. Public Domain

While incarcerated, Minor worked for many years as a valued contributor to the OED. Murray and his staff long assumed that the physician was a member of the Broadmoor staff—Minor refused all invitations to meet any of them—and it was a grave shock when the truth was learned. Nevertheless, Murray and Minor became friends, and despite his mental illness, Minor sent in his many contributions until in 1910 he was granted permission to return to America, where he lived out his last years. Readers interested in discovering more about Minor might look at Simon Winchester’s “The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.”

The Care and Feeding of a Dictionary

Over the years, Murray and his associates issued the dictionary in parts, or fascicles. With the completion of the project in 1928, there were more than 400,000 entries housed in 10 volumes. In 1933, this ultimate authority on the English language was reissued in 12 volumes along with a “Supplement” of new words and phrases. This set was eventually issued in 20 volumes.

The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1989, in 20 volumes. mrpolyonymous/Flickr

With the advent of the electronic age, millions of dollars were spent on the digitalization of the dictionary. According to its online history: “In 1992 the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ again made history when a CD-ROM edition of the work was published. Suddenly a massive, 20-volume work that takes up four feet of shelf space and weighs 150 pounds is reduced to a slim, shiny disk that takes up virtually no space and weighs just a few ounces.”

Today this grand enterprise, requiring constant revisions and additions, truly does stand as one of the great achievements in the English language—and in any other language, for that matter. The sacrifices of the editors and their staff, and the countless hours expended by the volunteers who originally collected words and supportive quotations, and analyzed material, deserve, as Stanley Baldwin said nearly a century ago, our “gratitude and respect.”

The Oxford English Dictionary also stands as a monumental reminder of the importance of language and definitions to our culture. In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell rightly warned: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and by imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

In our own time, when language is often twisted for political ends, let us hope that our present-day lexicographers fully recognize their powers and responsibilities in shaping the meanings of the words of our common tongue.