March 2024

Book Group: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heros who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, Sarah Olgilvie, 2023

A pleasant read. I can’t say it was deeply engaging, or that it gave me a new perspective on anything, but it was an interesting snapshot of a time and of the project to produce the OID; and it provided glimpses of the lives of those who contributed words and usage examples to the dictionary.

The book describes the early period — roughly the first sixty years — of the dictionary, focusing on the period of John Murray’s editorship (1879-1915). Murray was the third editor, succeeding Frederick Furnivall who was editor for two decades, and Herbert Coleridge, the first editor, who died after two years on the job. It was Murray who, over his 36 year tenure, who is really responsible for the creation of the OED.

Descriptive, not prescriptive. The OED was notable because it was the first dictionary to be based on usage, describing the actual language, rather than what scholars decided was correct. As part of this aim, it provided copious examples of usage, and tried to track the development and evolution of different senses of the same word over time. And that in turn required a vast number of people to gather and send in examples.

Crowdsourced. The book is not inaccurate or hyperbolic in calling it the Wikipedia of its time. Indeed, as the book unfolds, it becomes clear that there were lots of collective efforts — many being what we would now call ‘citizen science’ — underway. It would be nice to understand what it was about the culture and the period of time that made such broad collective projects feasible. The book offers a thought or two — that there were many self-educated people who were not part of academic institutions; that there were many who had the interest, means and time, including educated women in the home — but that question is not its focus.

The basic type of contribution was for a person to read a book, and produce a set of slips, each with a word, and an example of its usage drawn from a published source. Typically, a person would read a book and produced anywhere from dozens to hundreds of slips, which would be sent to Murray, and filed alphabetically. Other types of contributors: sub-editor… xxx

Inclusive. It is interesting to note that the OED aimed to be inclusive, even though its sponsoring organization was not always keen on this approach. Inclusivity played out in two ways.
• Content: One was in the words it contained: in addition to ‘proper English,’ it included slang, foreign imports, words from different dialects, and (gradually and cautiously due to obscenity laws) taboo words.
• Contribution. The project accepted contributions from anyone. It was not confined or even focused on academics (and in Britain did not get a lot participation from scholars). Its attempts to recruit people included women, and person’s from countries outside the UK, including America.

Genesis and Nature of the book. The book’s author, Sarah Olgilvy, worked as a lexicographer at the modern OED. Shortly before the end of her work there, while browsing in the OED archives, she happened to discover a notebook belonging to John Murray, in which he had recorded the names, addresses, and other information about each contributor. There were about 3,000 names. She decided that she would try to document something about the lives of these contributors, and this book is the result. It is organized alphabetically – A is for Archeologist, B is for Best Contributor, C is for Cannibal, etc. — and uses these rubrics as a way to present stories about various contributors. Some cateogories are a bit sensational (Cannibal, Junkie, Murderer, Pornographer), and others seem rather arbitrary (Best Contributor, Rain Collectors, Zealots), but they serve well enough.

The stories. Aside from this, it is mainly a set of stories of diverse people, interwoven with their interactions with James Murray, and the incredible amount of work (correspondence, visits, encouragement, discipline) that he did to keep contributors contributing. If the book has a failing, it is that those whose stories are told tend to be middle or occasionally upperclass people whose lives left historical traces; it would be interesting to have a sense of what proportion of contributors were of sufficiently humble backgrounds that there was no grist for stories.

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