War of the words: how the idea of the OED was translated into fact

The Oxford English Dictionary was long regarded as an Olympian production, ruling with impersonal finality on all aspects of English usage. The driving force behind its compilation, Sir James Murray (1837-1915), was the subject of an affectionate memoir by his granddaughter Kathleen Murray, Caught in the Web of Words (1977), which threw light on his working practices; more recently, in The Meaning of Everything (2003), Simon Winchester studied the dictionary itself. Now Lynda Mugglestone, making use of hitherto unexamined proof sheets of the dictionary, and of Murray's personal papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, has filled out and fruitfully complicated our picture of this great lexicographical achievement, giving it a more human face.

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The original contract for the New English Dictionary, as it was then called, was signed in 1879. It stipulated four volumes, expected to be complete within ten years. In fact, the final volume appeared in 1928, by which time 50 million words had been defined in nearly 15,500 pages. Work had already started on supplementary volumes, of which five appeared between 1933 and 1986; the online edition has been available since 2000, and is constantly updated. How Murray, laboring among his pigeonholes of thousands of handwritten submissions from a host of contributors, would have envied our modern researchers their databases!

Decisions about what to include in, and what to exclude from, the dictionary, and about how to define what was included, tormented the editorial team. Not only some of them, but also the Delegates of the University Press, to whom Murray was responsible, deprecated the acceptance of scientific terms, slang and jargon, and "Americanisms," and urged drastic curtailment of the scope of definitions and illustrative quotations, for which they advocated a terminal limit of 1900. There was a constant battle between Murray's perfectionism and the commercial imperatives of his publishers. Alterations were still being made at proof stage, with fresh evidence constantly coming to hand; entries were redrafted, expanded, abbreviated, or thrown out entirely. The apparently simple word "do," for example, occupied 17 columns and cost Murray six months' work. The editors disagreed over the spelling, pronunciation, and etymology of many words. Some were found to be nonexistent: "Abacot," enshrined since 1721 in Samuel Johnson's and Noah Webster's dictionaries among others, and defined as "a cap of state ... worn anciently by the kings of England," turned out to be a misprint of "bycocket," a headdress.

Other words carried ideological baggage. "Chief" was defined as "the head man ... of a small uncivilized community"; "blanket" was said to be worn "by savages or destitute persons, for clothing." Equally, many entries were rewritten to eliminate subjective bias. Even the sources of citations were subject to evaluative prejudice, classic authors being preferred to periodicals (a major source of quotations in the Supplements, since new usages are more promptly recorded in the press). Strict rationing was imposed. One contributor, Fitzedward Hall, unearthed over 200 quotations for "hand" and had to be tactfully informed by Murray that "we have to consider the question of space."

Murray had originally stated that the dictionary would contain "every English word whatever." This proved an impossible ideal. What, after all, was "English"? Murray's answer was that it was "a central mass" with "no discernible circumference." Elsewhere he described the language as "a spot of colour on a damp surface, which shades away imperceptibly into the surrounding colourlessness." The dictionary operated on "historical principles," but the fact that its appearance spanned many years meant that it evolved with the language it recorded. Since written usage always lags behind speech, the dates assigned to new senses of many words were far too late. Some words disappeared at the proof stage simply because they were so exotic that they were unlikely ever to be used; casualties included "graiomania" (a passion for all things Greek) and "lericompoop" (verb, "to hoax").

Sexual terminology presented a special problem. There is an endearing story of Dr. Johnson being rebuked by two respectable old ladies for including obscenities in his dictionary: "Ah, my dears," he teased, "so you have been looking for them!" Victorians were more prudish, which led to the omission of many words and the labeling of others as "vulgar," "coarse," or used only by "the lowest classes." Still others, innocuous enough, went because they simply could not fit into the available blank space on the sheets of the latest installment. There was room for neither "landscaping" nor "lunching," both of which appeared in supplements with dates of first usage that are simply wrong, their original inclusion having been forgotten.

However, although lexicography could not be a "science," it was assumed that linguistics could. "I am a man of science," Murray declared, comparing himself to an anthropologist. Mugglestone recounts the battles over the place of scientific terminology in the dictionary, which was itself an evolving enterprise, almost on Darwinian lines--indeed, Charles Darwin recognized that "language is an altering element," its everyday words worn smooth like pebbles on the beach, leaving few traces of their origin. For Johnson in 1755, "science" had been primarily "knowledge" and "scientist" a nonexistent word; for the OED team, such matters had proliferated bewilderingly. In a striking anticipation of modern theory, Richard Chenevix Trench cast doubt on the status of scientific terms, which he held to be merely "signs" or "tokens," rather than real words. He and others deprecated their inclusion in what was seen as fundamentally a work of literary reference. Murray smuggled many through, but inevitable others were overlooked, given the dizzying speed with which scientific research developed in the nineteenth century, and the transient currency of some of its neologisms.

A central question confronting any lexicographer is that of description versus prescription. Dictionaries are often appealed to for decisions on "right" and "wrong" usage. Modern linguistics recoils this, preferring the criterion of appropriateness to context. From the outset, Murray intended the OED to the a record of actual usage, not a legislator in the Johnsonian mold. He resented the letters he received demanding his opinions on spelling or pronunciation ("I am not the editor of the English language"), yet, in print, he had to legislate. Should one put "a historian" or "an historian," "disyllable" or "dissyllable," "rhyme" or "rime"? When did a usage become obsolete? How many dialect words should be included, from which dialects, and on what grounds? Murray's coeditor, Henry Bradley, whose verbal fluency was such that he reputedly never uttered an ungrammatical sentence, fought rearguard actions over "enthuse" (verb), "feasible" (in the sense of "probable"), and many others, in an attempt to fix meaning artificially.

As the new century unfolded, old age and the First World War claimed the lives of many contributors (proofs were read even in the trenches). Paper was scarce, and the rate of printing slowed to a crawl. Murray died in 1915, worn out by incessant toil; he was 78. Thirteen years later, the end of the great work was celebrated by a banquet attended by the prime minister. Murray's daughter Rosfrith, who had helped her father since childhood, was banned from the feast because of her sex, and had to watch the men eat from the balcony. The expansion of the online dictionary may be infinite, but at least its male and female employees can discuss it together over lunch.

Lost for Words

The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary

by Lynda Mugglestone

Yale University Press, 266 pp., $30

Paul Dean is head of English at the Dragon School, Oxford, and a fellow of the English Association.

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