The OED Era
It had been more than a century since Johnson published his revolutionary Dictionary.
Prodded by Richard Chenevix Trench, London’s Philological Society called for a dictionary that would (1) cover the entire English language, (2) show the history of every word, and (3) back it all up with illustrative quotations to support every sense.
The result was the Oxford English Dictionary, widely known as the OED and universally recognized as the greatest achievement in English lexicography. The Scotsman James A.H. Murray, the most important of its editors, oversaw most of the 12-volume dictionary before his death in 1915.
UNREGISTERED WORDS COMMITTEE
Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary of the Philological Society. London: Trübner & Co., 1859.
The Philological Society formed an Unregistered Words Committee charged with preparing a supplement to Johnson. The committee—a philological triumvirate consisting of Trench, Frederick J. Furnivall, and Herbert Coleridge—soon realized that a supplement wouldn’t be enough: they’d need to start from scratch. This Proposal spells out “the main outlines of the plan upon which the New Dictionary will be constructed.” It’s the first public glimpse of what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 82
CAN HE STILL CLAIM IT?
Letter of Frederick J. Furnivall, former editor of the OED, to Anna Ward. 2 April 1879.
ALS.
Though superseded as editor on 1 March 1879, Furnivall nevertheless signed this letter, a month later, as “The Editor.” His correspondent was Anna L. Ward, the editor of quotation books. She was urging a variant reading of a line in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 96
AN OXFORD CHARACTER
Sir William Rothenstein. Portrait of James A.H. Murray. 1893.
Lithograph.
The longest-serving and most important of the OED’s chief editors was a Scottish schoolmaster, James A.H. Murray.
In 1893, the painter and printmaker William Rothenstein drew portraits of 24 noted Oxonians, and Murray was among them. Rothenstein had just returned from a few years studying in Paris, where he had been encouraged and befriended by James McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The “Oxford Characters” lithographs were published in 1896.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 96
HAS THE DEVIL GONE BLIND?
James A.H. Murray. Letter to Frederick J. Furnivall, 1894.
ALS.
Murray often received 60 missives in a day. One regular correspondent was the previous OED editor, Frederick Furnivall. Murray here demonstrates his exactitude and reflects on the challenges of staffing. The phrase discussed is when the devil is blind, meaning “at a date infinitely remote.” The quotation derives from an 1874 reprint of Rump Songs (1662), and its appearance in the OED suggests that Furnivall dutifully supplied the missing information: “1662 Rump Songs (1874) I.9 But when this comes to passe, say the Devil is blind.”
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 84
PROFESSOR AND THE ANGLO-SAXON MADMAN
James A.H. Murray. Letter to unknown American newspaper editor, probably at the Baltimore Sun, on Shakespeare’s birthday, 1901.
ALS.
In 1900–1901, the Baltimore Sun published arguments over the meaning of Anglo-Saxon. Murray, who was toiling through the entries from H to K, was testy about being drawn into the debate: “I am afraid I could not tell you whether the ‘the “idea” was before suggested,’ unless I were to inquire at all the Lunatic Asylums of the world.” These words take on an additional resonance when we remember that Murray had befriended a “madman” confined to a “lunatic asylum”—as recounted in The Professor and the Madman (book and film).
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 84
THE INCOMPARABLE ACHIEVEMENT
James A.H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W.A. Craigie, & C.T. Onions, eds. A New Dictionary on Historical Principles. First two fascicles (1884, 1885) signed by Murray for Fitzedward Hall, a major contributor. With Hall’s marginalia throughout.
Ex coll. Clinton Ives Smullyan Jr.
[Same.] Murray’s English Dictionary. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888–1928.
[Same.] A New Historical Dictionary. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888–1928.
The Oxford English Dictionary was the work of six editors-in-chief, dozens of paid staffers, and thousands of unpaid volunteers from the around the world who collected five million quotation slips. What was supposed to be a 4-volume dictionary completed in 10 years turned into a 12-volume dictionary that took 69 years to reach fruition. It’s a monument to Victorian scholarship, and while it continues to be updated, revised, and expanded, it’s hard to imagine its ever being superseded.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 96
IF WORSE COMES TO WORSENMENT
OED printing plate for vol. 12, sig. 62, p. 318. Steel and antimony. Ca. 1928.
The OED’s printing presses must have been a sight to behold. The 15,487 pages required 15,487 steel plates. The scale of the production boggles the mind. By the late 1980s, computerized typesetting turned the 3.5-pound plates into 20 tons of scrap. A few were sold or claimed as souvenirs, and somewhere between 100 and 300 plates were spared. The Garner Collection has 18 of them. This plate produced vol. 12, p. 318, covering the pessimistic terms worse to worsenment.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 97
ABRIDGING AN INCOMPLETE BOOK
H.W. Fowler & F.G. Fowler, eds. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911.
To recover its costs, Oxford University Press needed cheaper, handier spinoffs of its big dictionary. The first to market was The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, the work of the Fowler brothers of usage fame. Because the OED had reached only R, the Fowlers had to produce all new material for S to Z. Selling for three shillings sixpence, the book proved immediately successful, with strong reviews and sales of 40,000 copies in the first year.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 99
ABRIDGING TOO FAR? NO.
H.W. Fowler & F.G. Fowler, eds. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
The OED begat the Concise, and the Concise begat the Pocket—that is, the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, also prepared by the Fowler brothers. The trim size is even smaller than the already-small Concise. “The great Oxford Dictionary,” the publisher announced, “is the ultimate source of most of the information . . . . It is thus possible to claim for the little book unique authority among books of its size and price.”
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 99
LONGER THAN THE OTHER ABRIDGMENTS, BUT SHORTER
William Little, H.W. Fowler, J. Coulson & C.T. Onions, eds. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.
One adaptation of the OED preserves the historical character of its model. C.T. Onions’s staff had to compress 15,000 large quarto pages into just 2,500 smaller pages. They achieved this condensation by omitting most quotations and limiting their coverage to words in use since 1700.
The current sixth edition of this book contains 600,000 definitions and about one-third the coverage of the OED. Though it is available as a smartphone app, it remains the largest English print dictionary maintained by Oxford University Press.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 99
LORD OF THE W’S
Bust of J.R.R. Tolkien by Stephen Paterson.
Undoubtedly the most popular writer ever to have engaged in serious lexicography, Tolkien was born in South Africa and read Classics and then English studies at Oxford. He was tutored by three great philologists: Kenneth Sisam, Joseph Wright, and William Craigie. As a member of the Lancashire Fusiliers, he saw combat at the Battle of the Somme. After the war, he returned to Oxford and worked under Henry Bradley on the Oxford English Dictionary—mostly in the Ws. Oxford University Press still maintains his manuscript notes.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 94
14TH-CENTURY VERBAL ADVENTURES
J.R.R. Tolkien. A Middle English Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922.
Tolkien’s Middle English Vocabulary began as a glossary to accompany Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, published in 1921 with copious notes but no glossary. Sisam pulled Tolkien off the OED staff to complete it. Tolkien’s glossary, with 4,500 entries and 6,800 definitions, is fastidious: each definition is keyed to a textual passage. All 15,000 citations had to be individually identified and selected. The book also has 1,900 cross-references, often to account for linguistic variants. More interesting adventures lay ahead.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 94