Browse Items (14 total)

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,…

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…

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…

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,”…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…