Oxford English Dictionary

• 1. Introduction

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  The Oxford English Dictionary is not simply a list of words and their meanings. It is a record of the English language across centuries, tracing how words entered the world, shifted in meaning, and sometimes faded away entirely. Work began on it in 1857, and it took until 1928 for the first edition to be completed. That is 71 years. And the project has never really stopped.

  The dictionary that exists today contains over 520,000 entries, nearly 900,000 meanings, and close to four million illustrative quotations. The entry for the verb "set" alone once required 60,000 words to describe roughly 580 senses. The second edition, published in 1989, ran to 20 volumes and more than 21,000 pages. A third edition is in progress, expected to be completed around 2037 and projected to cost approximately 34 million pounds. Its editors expect it will never be printed at all.

  How does a dictionary become something like this? Who decided that English needed a comprehensive historical record, traced word by word, from earliest known use to the present? And what happened to the people who gave their lives to the project, some of them never living to see it finished?

• 2. A Society Dissatisfied

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  Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall were the three London intellectuals whose dissatisfaction with existing English dictionaries set the entire project in motion. They belonged to the Philological Society, and as early as 1844, that society had expressed interest in producing something better. But concrete action did not begin until June 1857, when they formed an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that current dictionaries had missed or poorly defined.

  Trench's contribution that November was not a list of missing words. It was a systematic critique titled "On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries", which identified seven distinct failures in the dictionaries of the time. Obsolete words were incompletely covered. Related word families were handled inconsistently. Dates for earliest recorded use were often wrong. The history of obsolete senses was frequently omitted. Synonyms were not clearly distinguished. Good illustrative quotations were used too sparingly. And space was wasted on content that was neither useful nor original.

  What began as a search for unlisted words became something far more ambitious. The society realized the number of missing words dwarfed anything the existing dictionaries contained. On the 7th of January 1858, they formally committed to a comprehensive new dictionary on historical principles. Volunteer readers would be assigned specific books and asked to copy out passages illustrating how particular words were actually used. The project had a method. What it still lacked was a publisher.

• 3. The Editors and Their Struggles

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  Trench withdrew early. His appointment as Dean of Westminster left him no time, and so Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On the 12th of May 1860, Coleridge published his plan for the dictionary and set research in motion from his own house, which became the project's first editorial office. He organized 100,000 quotation slips in a grid of 54 pigeon-holes. In April 1861, the first sample pages appeared. Later that same month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis, aged 30.

  Furnivall took over and brought considerable energy to the role, though he was, by the source's own accounting, temperamentally ill-suited to it. Volunteer readers drifted away. Slips were misplaced. Furnivall's response was to found new societies rather than compile a dictionary. In 1864, he established the Early English Text Society, and in 1868 the Chaucer Society, both to publish old manuscripts that volunteers needed to read. He recruited more than 800 volunteers for this work. After 21 years, he handed his successor nearly two tons of quotation slips.

  James Murray, who accepted the editorship after Furnivall's failed attempts to recruit Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol, met with several publishers before Oxford University Press agreed in 1878 to take the project on. Murray worked in a corrugated iron shed he called the "Scriptorium", lined with shelves and 1,029 pigeon-holes. He discovered that Furnivall's collection was skewed: there were ten times as many quotations for "abusion" as for "abuse". Murray appealed through newspapers for readers who would seek out quotations for common words as well as rare ones. By 1880, 2,500,000 slips had arrived.

  Late in his editorship, Murray discovered that one of his most prolific contributors, W. C. Minor, was confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Minor was a Yale University-trained surgeon and American Civil War military officer who had killed a man in London. From his asylum room, he invented his own system for tracking and submitting quotation slips in response to editors' requests. The story of Murray and Minor was later retold in the 1998 book "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" and formed the basis for a 2019 film starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.

• 4. Building Under Pressure

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  Philip Gell of Oxford University Press pressed Murray and his colleague Henry Bradley relentlessly over costs and the pace of production. Newspapers, particularly the Saturday Review, reported on this pressure, and public opinion sided with the editors. Gell was eventually fired, and the university reversed his cost-cutting policies.

  Murray died in 1915, having completed the letters A through D, H through K, O through P, and T. That amounts to nearly half the finished dictionary. Henry Bradley, whom Murray had hired in 1884 and who had been forced on Murray as a parallel senior editor against Murray's wishes, died in 1923, having completed E through G, L through M, S through Sh, St, and W through We. William Craigie, who started work in 1901, eventually worked on the dictionary from Chicago, where he was a professor. Charles Talbut Onions took on the remaining letter ranges beginning in 1914.

  The first fascicle of the dictionary had appeared on the 1st of February 1884, covering words from A to Ant across 352 pages and priced at 12 shillings and 6 pence. Total sales reached only 4,000 copies. The 125th and final fascicle, covering the end of W, was published on the 19th of April 1928. The most-quoted writer in the completed first edition was William Shakespeare, with "Hamlet" his most-cited individual work. The most-quoted female writer was George Eliot. The most-quoted single text overall was "Cursor Mundi"; collectively, the Bible in its many translations was cited most.

  In 1919 and 1920, J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED researching etymologies for the range from Waggle to Warlock. He later parodied the dictionary's four principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in his story "Farmer Giles of Ham".

• 5. Computerizing the Dictionary

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  By 1933, the entire first edition had been reissued in 12 bound volumes under the name "The Oxford English Dictionary", with a one-volume supplement bringing the set to 13 volumes. The dictionary was then formally set aside. The quotation slips went into storage.

  Within roughly two decades, the dictionary was already out of date. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit a new supplement; the work was expected to take about seven years. It took 29. The supplement grew to four volumes, published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986. Burchfield extended the dictionary's coverage to English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom, including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. However, in 2012, lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie revealed that Burchfield had quietly removed many entries from the 1933 supplement. A sample calculation estimated the removals included around 17% of foreign loan words and words from regional forms of English.

  In June 1983, Oxford University Press invited tenders from computer companies, software houses, and academic departments to help computerize the two texts. Richard Charkin had argued that the first edition and the supplement should be merged electronically. No single agency could manage the full task, so OUP set up its own department, the New OED Project, under Tim Benbow, with Edmund Weiner and John Simpson as co-editors. The International Computaprint Corporation converted the text into electronic form by keyboarding, since the print quality of the first edition was too poor for optical character recognition. In all, 350 million characters were keyed, requiring 120 person-years. Proof-reading took a further 60 person-years. Eighteen monthly batches of proofs were returned to Oxford between 1985 and 1986, checked by more than 50 proof-readers.

  Automatic integration was completed in May 1987 and handled about 80% of the text, saving an estimated 50 to 60 percent of manual editorial work. A program named LEXX, developed by IBM scientist Mike Cowlishaw, was repurposed for the project and renamed OEDIPUS: "OED Integration, Publishing, and Updating System". The University of Waterloo in Ontario set up a Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary to design the database system; that work eventually became the basis for the Open Text Corporation.

• 6. The Second and Third Editions

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  When the second edition was published on paper in March 1989, it ran to 20 volumes, 21,730 pages, and 290,500 entries. Author Anthony Burgess called it "the greatest publishing event of the century", as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. Time magazine dubbed it "a scholarly Everest". Richard Boston, writing in The Guardian, described it as "one of the wonders of the world".

  In 1988, the first electronic version of the dictionary had been made available. The OED Online launched on the 14th of March 2000. By April 2014, it was receiving over two million visits per month. An individual subscription costs 100 pounds or 100 US dollars a year, which means most subscribers are universities, public libraries, and other large organizations. In the United Kingdom, public library access is funded through the Arts Council.

  Work on the third edition began with the launch of that first online site in 2000. Editors started their revision from the letter M rather than from A, since the later entries in the first edition tended to be of higher quality than the earlier ones. In March 2008, the editors announced they would alternate between advancing through the alphabet and updating key words from across the dictionary. By December 2010, purely alphabetical revision was abandoned. By 2018, approximately half of the third edition was complete. John Simpson was the first chief editor of OED3; he retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt, who became the eighth chief editor.

  The third edition is expected to roughly double the dictionary's size. The entry for "make" broke the all-time record for longest entry in 2000, "put" surpassed it in 2007, and "run" surpassed that in 2011 with 645 senses. The CEO of Oxford University Press has stated that the third edition is unlikely to ever be printed.

• 7. Criticism and Legacy

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  British prime minister Stanley Baldwin described the OED as a "national treasure". Tim Bray, co-creator of Extensible Markup Language, credits the dictionary as a direct inspiration for XML's development.

  University of Oxford linguist Roy Harris, writing in his review of the 1982 supplement, argued that criticizing the dictionary is "extremely difficult" because one faces "not just a dictionary but a national institution". Harris noted that neologisms from writers such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf were included, while equally useful words from less prestigious sources were not. He characterized the dictionary's approach as prescriptive rather than descriptive, and argued that the editors' classification of certain usages as "erroneous" reflected the social biases of its compilers.

  The Guide to the Third Edition of the OED has since stated that the dictionary is "not an arbiter of proper usage" and is "intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive". The designation of usages as "erroneous and catachrestic" is being removed from third edition entries, sometimes replaced with usage notes.

  A separate line of criticism concerns the dictionary's handling of words from African American Vernacular English and African language origins. Words such as "jazz", "dig", and "badmouth" lack etymologies; the latter two are possibly derived from Wolof and Mandinka languages respectively. Oxford University Press is preparing a specialized Oxford Dictionary of African American English in collaboration with Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, with literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. as editor-in-chief.

  The 2020 novel "The Dictionary of Lost Words" by Pip Williams centres on the creation of the OED, with a fictional narrator who grows up in the Scriptorium as a lexicographer's daughter. It has been adapted for the stage, and a television series is in development.