topics: |  lexicography | biography | history

This eminently readable book has lost its lustre following the broad
success of the more dramatic The Professor andthe Madman: A Tale of
Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary_; which
tells the same tale but focuses more on the relationship between James
Murray the first editor of the OED, and the prolific contributor WC Minor,
a doctor, madman and a murderer.

The meaning of everything, which is the original book winchester wrote on
this topic, tells the larger story, the story of English
lexicography starting with Coventry schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey's first
English-only dictionary,
      published for the benefit of Ladies... or other unskilfull persons 23
and moving through Samuel Johnson and other lexicographers until the
enormous labour of the OED.

the beginning

In June 1857 (just when the mutiny was erupting in India), three members of
the London Philological Society agreed that existing dictionaries of English
were simply not good enough and something better was needed.  The three were:

* Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster (soon to be Archbishop of
	Dublin, when he had to distance himself from the project)

* Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet and a precocious a prodigy who
  	was double-first in classics and mathematics at Balliol - and at age
  	27 the first formal editor of the OED 50-58

* Frederick Furnivall - a prodigiously talented eccentric, with a
	fondness for the ladies - became editor after Coleridge's untimely
	death in 1861, but lacked the needed discipline (p.59-69)

The philological society normally discussed questions such as why the
dimunitive -let created rivulet and not riverlet - but now it formed
the Unregistered Words Committee whose members would add to the
inventory of words in English.

In November 1857, Trench made a presentation on defects of dictionaries to
the philological society.  He noted seven deficiencies:
	1) obsolete words were not covered,
	2) families or groups of words were capriciously organized,
	3) histories of words rarely went back far enough,
	4) important senses were passed over, esp those that were obsolete now
	5) little care was given to distinguishing near synonyms
	6) there was a lot of redundancy and bloated coverage, leaving gaps, and
	7) illustrative quotations were inadequate, especially historically.
	   this was because much of the literature which ought to have been
	   used for illustrative quotations had not been read with this view.  p.40

This last point was clearly the biggest stumbling block.

the idea of a dictionary on historical principles

Trench proposed to create such a dictionary, that would contain a historical
biography for every word, and a list of senses based on wide reading.   The
reading would be based on the collaboration with an army of volunteers:

	But how, it may naturally be asked, shall all books be read? In that
	most interesting preface which Jacob Grimm has prefixed to his own
	and his brother's German Dictionary, he makes grateful and honourable
	mention of no less than eighty-three volunteer coadjutors, who had
	undertaken each to read for him one or more authors, and who had
	thrown into the common stock of his great work ... the results of
	their several toils.  ... It is something of this common action which the
	Philological Society has suggested to its members. It entertained,
	also, from the first a hope, in which it has not been disappointed,
	that many besides its own members would gladly divide with them the
	toil and honour of such an undertaking. ...

	An entire army would join hand in hand till it covered the breadth of
	the island this drawing as with a sweep-net over the whole extent of
	English literature, is that which we would fain see...
		Trans. Phil. Soc. (fulltext)

Thus, by involving in the making of the lexicon the very people who spoke
and read the language, the project would be of the people, a scheme that
quite literally, would be classically democratic.  p.44

After the initial work of Coleridge and Furnivall (who was not disciplined
enough to run the dictionary), the mantle of editorship would pass to James
Murray (1867).  In 1905,

After many difficulties in terms of finding a source for funding the
gigantic project, and after being rebuffed from several sources and working
without a guarantee for many years, it was only in 1879, that the OUP
agreed to fund the project - a 7,000 page dictionary to be funded over ten
years at a cost of £9000.  It would eventually take 54 years to complete,
and it would fill 16,000 pages and cost £300,000.  [p.94]

Volunteers and other Contributors

Dr. W.C. Minor

The characters of The Professor and the madman also make an entry here,
but the story is limited to five pages or so.  Winchester lists W.C. Minor
(the madman) as one of the most prodigious - and most specific -
volunteers.

William Chester Minor (1834-1920)

Minor was born in Sri Lanka but the family emigrated to America, finishing
his medical college at Yale.  During the civil war, he joined the Union
army as a surgeon and became increasingly unstable in the decades after the
war, with a pronounced addiction to prostitutes.  On a visit to London, he
shot a man in a fit of schizophrenia, and was interned at the Broadmoor
lunatic asylum, where he had two rooms - one as a library and the other for
sleeping.  The wife of the man he had murdered helped him by in the work by
getting him books.

He was a prodigious reader with a fascination for collecting antiquarian
books - especially reports from India and other topics of his interest.
Minor would not send in his quotes to be pigeonholed in the burgeoning
woodwork that kept expanding beyond all conception.  His method was to
receive a card from Murray saying they were working on such and such a
group of words.  He would then immediately send in a long list of citations
of these particular words, such as this one for "set", from a 1550 text:

   ‘a1548 Hall Chron., Hen. IV. (1550) 32b, Duryng whiche sickenes as Auctors
    write he caused his crowne to be set on the pillowe at his beddes heade.’


[image of note cited above (from http://www.oed.com/public/contrib/contributors#minor)]

Minor could find such citations immediately because he had manually (by
writing spaced out entries on a ledger) created concordances of the old
books from his library that he read every day for this purpose.

Despite repeated invitations from Murray, Minor would never come to Oxford to
meet the editors.  Eventually, Murray himself set off to the Broadmoor
Lunatic asylum, to discover that Dr. Minor was not on the staff but an inmate
who had committed a murder.  After Minor fell ill (he had cut off his penis
from self-loathing), Murray eventually arranged for Minor to be released
(through the offices of Home secretary Winston Churchill)
and he returned home to America.

Fitzedward Hall

				[W gives a much pithier account than the following]

Another prodigious contributor was also an American, Fitzedward Hall.  Hall
had spent several decades in India, where he became fluent in Hindustani,
Bengali and Sanskrit (in addition to the French, Italian, modern Greek
which he spoke fluently).  Arriving in Calcutta in 1846, to look for a
brother he never found, he went on to stay.  He translated texts and was
appointed to the senior position of Inspector of Schools in Varanasi.  He
was also holed up in a seven month siege during the 1857 insurrection.

He joined the Asiatic Society and quickly became known as a leading orientalist,
editing and publishing a number of sanskrit works.

sankhyA-pravachana-bhAShya

In his noted edition of vijn~Ana vikshu's commentary on the saMkhyA of
Kapila - sankhya-pravachana-bhAshya - the main text is in sanskrit, with
the original text and analysis in sanskrit, without any English commentary.
I could not discern if the prose analysis is by Fitzedward or whether he
simply reproduces the text of vijnAna vikshu without comment, limiting
himself to analyzing variants in the text (given in a pATHAntara list at
the end).  Presumably this is a compilation from a large number of
manuscripts; upon his death, Hall donated his collection of more than a
thousand manuscripts to the Harvard library.

In the lengthy 70 page preface, footnotes constitute about 85% of the text.
Hall debates many issues, starting with whether the sAMkhya is an atheistic
philosophy.  In this he debates M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire who states that
Colbrooke has cited Indian commentators to claim that the sAnkhya is
atheistic.  However, Hall shows that Henry Thomas Colbrooke had cited
several of Kapila's "aphorisms" and translated I.92 as "there is no proof
of God's existence, unperceived by the senses, not inferred from reasoning,
nor yet revealed."  [sankhyA denies monism, arguing for a dualist position,
puruSha (consciousness) and prakr^ti (matter), but is traditionally
considered an Astika school, one that does not deny the vedas.]  Hall then
ranges widely to debate a number of other aspects, as far afield as whether
jayadeva the poet was also the logician of the same name.  He freely quotes
long excerpts, often more than a page, in greek or french, and of course,
sanskrit, without bothering to provide any gloss - as was the norm in that
era.

return to england

After his return to England in 1862, he took up the chair of Sanskrit (and
jurisprudence!) at King's College, London.  He joined the philological
society.  However, in 1869, he had an academic spat, lost his job, and a
year later his family also left him.

In this splendid isolation, he became an obsessive contributor to the OED.  A
complete recluse, he refused to meet Murray.  Yet he not only contributed
quotations to address specific points but also rigorously went through the
proofs, spending at least four hours a day on OED work, over many years.
Murray reported to the philological society:
	the splendid assistance rendered to the Dictionary by Dr. Fitzedward
	Hall, who devotes nearly his whole day to reading the proofs...and to
	supplementing, correcting, and increasing the quotations taken from
	his own exhaustless stores. When the Dictionary is finished, no man
	will have contributed to its illustrative wealth so much as
	Fitzedward Hall. Those who know his books know the enormous wealth of
	quotation which he brings to bear upon every point of English
	literary usage; but my admiration is if possible increased when I see
	how he can cap and put the cope-stone on the collections of our 1500
	readers.“

When Hall died in 1901, having checked proofs upto the page for lap, there
was profound grief in the OED team.  190-194

The OED also cites many works by Hall himself: ( list at oed.com sources)
particularly, his Rational Refut. Hindu Philos. Syst.

JRR Tolkien

Among others who worked on the OED was JRR Tolkien, who laboured on
W (1919-20).  There are not Greek or Latin words that begin with W, and
these words go back to the oldest strata in the language.  The etymology of
walrus was one of the difficult challenges unfurled by Tolkien.  p.206

Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham has a story "The Four Wise Clerks of
Oxenford", referring to the four parallel editors of the OED a the time -
James Murray, Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C.T. Onions.

Henry Bradley

Yet another fascinatingly erudite character.  Recently arrived in London,
with family and four children, the "dauntingly learned" Bradley wrote a
review for the part I of the first volume of the OED.   The essay was on the
whole enthusiastic:
	if the level of excellence achieved in this opening part be sustained
	throughout, the completed work will be an achievement without
	parallel in the lexicography of any living language.
In particular, he found the judicious use of quotations far suprieor to
M. Lettre's French dictionary, whose typographic chaos was also deprecated
compared to the elegant design of Murray.

but he was not slavish in his praise, and wondered if

* it was right to remark that the word anemone signified 'daughter of the
  wind' since the greek suffix was not, he said with the casual confidence of
  one who knew, 'exclusively patronymic'
* alpaca was not Arabic in origin, as Murray had written, but more likely to
  be Spanish.

[W does not clarify if these observations were correct; looking at OED3, we
find him vindicated only partially in alpaca but not so in anemone.

alpaca Etymology in OED3:
       < Spanish alpaca or al-paco, < al Arabic article often prefixed to
	   names + paco, probably the name in a South American Indian
	   language of Peru.

anemone: < Latin anemōnē, < Greek ἀνεμώνη the wind-flower, lit. ‘daughter of
	 the wind,’ < ἄνεμ-ος wind + -ώνη feminine patronymic suffix. The
	 anglicized anemony was common last century. ]

Eventually, based on the strength of this single essay, Bradley was hired for
the OED, and eventually took over, after Murray's death from prostrate
cancer in 1915, as the chief editor.

About the later editors, Craigie and Onions, Winchester is extremely
cryptic.  In fact, after Murray dies, the rest of the story is told in 20
odd pages (about 10% of the book).

other helpers

Winchester also lists the two women sorters, Miss Skipper and Miss Scott
who sorted, for 15s per week, upwards of 1000
slips that came by post each day.  He lists the contributions of the Murray
children, who sub-sorted the slips (first letter, second letter, whole
word), and were paid between one to six pence per hour, depending on age.
A pay-hike proposal by Jowett Murray was nixed. 116-8

The compositors at the press included one James Gilbert who worked on
typesetting for the entire period of the OED, from lifting the first type
for A in 1882 to the completion of the final volume in 1828. (p.126)

Help (and interference) was also extended by Benjamin Jowett, who possibly
may have suggested some parts of the elegant typography.  Jowett was the
vice-chancellor of Oxford and Master of Balliol
	for whom there was a rhyme using his name and which ended 'there is
	no knowledge but i know it

	First come I. My name is Jowett
	There's no knowledge but I know it.
	I am the Master of this College,
	What I don't know isn't knowledge.
		[quoted H. C. Beeching The Masque of B-ll--l (1881)]

progress and completion

The C volume was finished in 1893.  Walter Skeat, an Anglo-Saxon expert and
dictionary editor, wrote this celebratory ditty:

		Wherever the English speech is spread,
		And the Union Jack flies free,
		The news will be greatfully, proudly read
		That you've conquered your A, B, C.
		But I fear it will come
		As a shock to some
		That the sad result will be
		That you're taking to dabble and dawdle and doze,
		To dolour and dumps, and - worse than those -
		To danger and drink
		And - shocking to think -
		To words that begin with D.

While quoting the poem, Winchester comments on its quality: "fairly execrable" p. 179

The dictionary was published in "fascicles" or book-segments - initially about 300+
pages, later 64 or larger (a typical volume had 1400+ pages.  The 125th
fascicle, Wise to end of W, came out on 19 April 1928.

[Possibly the Ws were delayed due to the complexities of W etymology - the
non-Graeco-Latin origins of many of the words as noted above...]

		1888	A	v. 1
		1893	C	v. 2
		1897	D	v. 3
		1900	F	v. 4
		1901	H	v. 5
		1908	L	v. 6
		1909	O	v. 7
		1914	Q	v. 8
		1919	Si	v.9 part 1
		1919	Su	v.9 part 2
		1926	Ti	v.10 part 1
		1928	V	v.10 part 2
		1928	all	v. 11 and 12

The total amount of type in the finished volumes "would stretch 178 miles -
from London to the suburbs of Manchester." 234

Sadly Murray had died in 1915, and did not see the finished work.

Samuel Johnson's dictionary

Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary set the standard for all future English
dictionaries.
[Winchester tries to argue that French and Italian are fixed languages by
virtue of their academies p.29 but surely these academies are responsive to
public usage.  E.g. even the forty immortals of the Academie Francaise had to
include "le weekend", say...]

Johnson too had started off trying to "preserve the purity and ascertain
the meaning of our English idiom" ("plan for the dictionary, 1747).  But
hallfway through, he fell in with the view of earlier lexicographer
Benjamin Martin:
	The pretence of fixing a standard to the purity and perfection of any
	language is utterly vain and impertinent, because no language as
	depending on arbitrary use and custom, can ever be permanently the
	same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what
	is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be counted uncouth and
	barbarous in another.
		-Lingua Britannica  Reformata,
		Winchester dates it to "twenty years before Johnson began
		(around 1725); the edition from google books is 1749.

from Johnson's famous Preface
	When I took the first survey of my undertaking [...] I applied myself
	to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be of use to
	ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time the
	materials of a dictionary, which, by degrees, I reduced to method.

This was a method which Johnson perhaps honoured more in the breach than the
observance (p.31).  The dictionary listed 43,500 words, with 118,000
illustrations, from selective texts, "a good number of which were amended by
Johnson if he didn't like the originals" (p.32).

The preface continued
	But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a
	lexicographer.
	... to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia,
	to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he
	seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.

Jonathon Green's ''Chasing the Sun: dictionary makers and the dictionaries
they made'' takes its name from this last line.

idiosyncracies

Some definitions were infamously political, e.g.
	Oats: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in
	    Scotland feeds the people.

others were libellous, e.g.
	Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by
	    the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to
	    whom excise is paid' p.32

a few were self-effacing:
	Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that
	    busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the
	    signification of words.  p.32

other entries were simply frightful, and violated the lexicographer's guiding
principle that the definition may not use words that are more complex than
the word being defined. e.g.

	Network: Any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with
	    interstices between the intersections  p.33

The first edition of 2000 copies were sold for £4.10s a copy - a good deal
of money for 1755.  Realizing this, Johnson produced a ssecond edition in
165 weekly parts, at sixpence each.  32

other strange entries

		[from http://www.samueljohnson.com/definitions.html]
Cough: A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.
Distiller: One who makes and sells pernicious and inflammatory spirits.
Dull: Not exhilaterating (sic); not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is
    dull work.
Far-fetch: A deep stratagem. A ludicrous word.
Jobbernowl: Loggerhead; blockhead.
Kickshaw: A dish so changed by the cookery that it can scarcely be known.
Pastern: The knee of a horse. (This is wrong. When Johnson was once asked how
    he came to make such a mistake, Boswell tells us he replied, "Ignorance,
    Madam, pure ignorance.")
Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who
    supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
Pension: An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is
    generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to
    his country.
Politician: 1. One versed in the arts of government; one skilled in
    politicks. 2. A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.
Reticulated: Made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities.
Tory: One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the
    apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.
Whig: The name of a faction.
To worm: To deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue,
    which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad.
Pension: An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is
    generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to
    his country.
Politician: 1. One versed in the arts of government; one skilled in
    politicks. 2. A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.
Reticulated: Made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities.
Tory: One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the
    apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.
Whig: The name of a faction.
To worm: To deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue,
    which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad.

The English language is a conglomerate of Latin words, bound together in a
Saxon cement; the fragments of the Latin being partly portions introduced
directly from the parent quarry, with all their sharp edges, and partly
pebbles of the same material, obscured and shaped by long rolling in a Norman
or some other channel.

links: official history of the OED

blurb

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That
Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the
English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English
Dictionary.

Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history
of the English language--"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully
unwieldy"--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the
irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful"
schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched
talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of
dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively
portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor
Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick
Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry
Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester
lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making--how unexpectedly
tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so
much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated--and how
bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of
books long after the B-volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated
iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium--the Scrippy or the
Shed, as locals called it--and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from
Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to
W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness,
and ultimate redemption.

The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the
greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's
supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project--a
seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the
world's unrivalled uber-dictionary.