Before Dictionaries, Teachers Could Not Mark Students as Just Wrong on Their Spelling
Simon Winchester. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. $14.95. 298pp, paperback. ISBN: 978-0-19-881439-9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
*****
The front matter of this book is highly engaging as I have spent a few minutes reading it before I could pull away to begin writing. While I was searching for a specific date when the Oxford English Dictionary was first put together, I learned about the various types of international dictionaries that have defined their times in the background. This curious conclusion stands out: “neither Shakespeare, nor any of the other great writing minds of the day – Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Ben Jonson – had access to what all of us today would be certain that he would have wanted: the lexical convenience that was first noticed by name in the late 15th century”, but only appeared as a book in 1538, “a dictionary”, edited by Sir Thomas Elyot (20). I have been thinking about problems related to this because many attribution studies question if “Shakespeare’s” authorial signature can be deduced from spellings such as “them” versus “‘em” or the utilization of strange words that “Shakespeare” invented or that do not appear in texts from this period by other authors. The reason Renaissance literature is particularly difficult for modern readers to comprehend is because of its spelling irregularities and strange varieties of meanings applied even to the same words. This irregularity persisted in part for at least a century beyond “Shakespeare’s” time as the debate was renewed by the authors in the “Daniel Defoe” circle, who argued for a language Academy like the one in France to police the language and keep it regulated and standard. They did not win this battle and there are still many irregular oddities in the English language. But the battle over the “dictionary” was won, and this tool allows modern writers to be able to figure out precisely what literary critics are saying. It is difficult to comprehend some “post-structuralism” or “formalist” theories because critics in these fields attempt to cloud the readers’ attention by the utilization of an extraordinary quantity of rare words, but if one looks up every one of them, the nonsense can be fully deciphered thanks to the precision and consistency of modern dictionaries. In other words, the study presented here of this particular dictionary really covers in part all of these sub-questions of authorship, individuality, and standardization.
Since I agree the construction of this dictionary was a grand endeavor, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to commence this book’s blurb thus: “‘The greatest enterprise of its kind in history,’ was the verdict of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in June 1928 when The Oxford English Dictionary was finally published. With its 15,490 pages and nearly two million quotations, it was indeed a monumental achievement”. This history covers the “hundreds” of “people” who achieved this task and the logical and philosophic problems they faced as they attempted “to catalogue the English language in its entirety.” The biographies covered include “Frederick Furnivall, cheerful promoter of an all-female sculling crew, to James Murray, self-educated son of a draper, who spent half a century guiding the project towards fruition.” The note ends with the mysterious question for readers to anticipate an answer to: “why Tolkien found it so hard to define ‘walrus’.”
There are engaging surprises throughout. For example, Oxford University Press left the design of the dictionary to its “printers” because as was explained in The Periodical: “‘The variety of type used, the many languages involved, and the multiplication of ‘arbitraries’ have demanded technical knowledge and minute accuracy to an extent probably unequalled in any other work’” (120-1).
The “Epilogue” includes some examples of complex type and design from Robert Cawdrey’s early attempt at the dictionary in the Table Alphabetical (1604) as well as from the Samuel Johnson Dictionary of the English Language (1755) (240). The latter is most commonly referred to when the “first” English dictionary is mentioned.
Another revealing section describes the difficult living and working arrangements early makes of the Oxford dictionary faced: “There was only just enough room for the eleven Murrays, let alone for the assistants – eight of them, eventually – who were required for the project”. The tightness of the quarters led them to build a “new Scriptorium”, and this turned out to be a bureaucratic nightmare due to the aesthetic shortfalls of the simple structure required that clashed with the more delicate architecture of the neighborhood (164). This description is explained by the picture of a monastic Murray with a long beard, in all black and amidst a room covered on all sides with sheets and books (165).
Those who are interested in publishing and want to imagine the most difficult publishing project that can be attempted will find what they seek in these pages. Too many youths complain about the tediousness of reading the dictionary, but without dictionaries it would be far more tedious to figure out what other writers are trying to say. Thus, this book is essential for all public and educational libraries in case researchers or students want to gain an appreciation for the labor involved in building a language.

Simon Winchester has previously written a detailed account of one of the foremost contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, in The surgeon of Crowthorne (OUP, 1988). He writes here that that book was 'essentially a footnote to history', and that in The meaning of everything he is ^writing the history itself. He duly covers in turn the growth of the English language from the first settlers here; early dictionaries; the establishment of the Unregistered Words Committee; the decision to produce 'an inventory of all known English words' giving 'a full-length illustrated biography of every word', its date of birth and 'a register of the ways in which it grew and evolved and changed itself and its meaning over the years'; the appointment of OED staff and establishment of premises, equipment and methods; 'the small army of volunteer readers' who sent in quotation slips, the product of 'reading and scanning and scouring all literature - all journals, magazines, papers, illuminated monastic treatises, and volumes of written and printed publicly accessible works'; the organisation of these; eventual, serial publication ('the longest sensational serial ever written', Arnold Bennett called it) and its reception; subsequent versions: supplements, micrograph, computerization, the second, 20-volume edition; the stunning statistics (414,825 headwords; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations; 15,490 pages; 227,779,589 letters and numbers; 178 miles of type, in the first full edition of 1928).

IN 1875, more than 15 years after the Philological Society of London had set out to assemble a new English dictionary, the incumbent editor, Frederick Furnivall, acknowledged that he had simply bogged down. New blood was needed. A member of the society came across a 10-year-old application for employment in the British Museum Library. The applicant was one James Murray, son of a linen draper, sometime bank clerk, now 38 years old and seeking extra work to supplement his meager earnings from the Mill Hill School, where he was teaching schoolboys while raising his own 11 children.

The library hadn't hired him -- perhaps because he didn't have a college degree. We get from his application an idea of the range and extent of linguistic learning of a single, modest, semiemployed polymath in mid-19th-century Britain. Murray would be qualified, Furnivall decided, to play a part in the realization of the mind-bending new dictionary. He sent around to his confederates copies of the application letter to the library.

''I possess,'' the schoolteacher had written straightforwardly, ''that general lexical & structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge'' of any language ''only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German and Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenecian to the point where it was left by Gesenius.'' . . .