Words Without End, Amen

   Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

   On this day in 1884, the first section (A to Ant) of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. The dictionary was to become the authoritative guide to the vocabulary of the English language. It would trace each word back to its roots and show through quotations how the word's meaning had changed over time. A to Ant cost $650 in today's dollars and sold 4,000 copies.
   Work on the dictionary had begun in London 24 years earlier after members of the Philological Society got fed up with the shortcomings of the dictionaries then in existence. It would be another 34 years before the tenth and final volume (V-Z) was published in 1928.
   The dictionary had several editors during the long span of its preparation, the most prominent being James Murray, who was editor from 1878 until his death in 1915. The first editor recruited volunteers to read books and ancient chronicles and send in quotations on slips of paper. The slips were then filed in a grid of pigeon-holes in the "scriptorium". The editor before Murray spent much of his time finding old manuscripts and having them printed for his 800 volunteers to digest.
   When Oxford University agreed to be the publisher, Murray moved the scriptorium from London to the backyard of his new home in Oxford. He received over a thousand quotation slips in the mail per day and had collected 2,500,000 slips by the time A to Ant saw the light of day.
   Oxford began paying Murray a salary. He was able to give up his teaching job with which he had been supporting his eleven children. It was only supposed to take another ten years to complete the dictionary, but it would end up taking well over thirty. These big projects tend to get out of hand. To speed things up, Murray called for more volunteer readers.
   Murray didn't realize till many years later that his best reader by far was an inmate at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. W.C. Minor was a graduate of Yale Medical School. He had served as a surgeon in the American Civil War. He later moved to London where he began having delusions which led him to kill a man. He had time and inclination at the asylum. Minor developed his own quotation-tracking system and used his army pension to buy old books to find examples of specific words.
   Oxford revised the 1928 edition in 1933 and printed it in 12 volumes, and said it was done. But English continued to change, and twenty years later the dictionary was obsolete. In 1957 work began on a supplement to the first edition. Oxford had not learned its lesson because it said this would take seven years. It took twenty-nine. The four volume supplement came out in 1986. Oxford realized it needed to integrate the supplement into a second edition which would be computerized. They called in an army of typists and the twenty volume second edition came out three years later, defining 291,500 words in 21,730 pages. The longest entry was the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe its 430 senses.
   Work on the third edition started in 2000 and is expected to be completed in 2037, so let's say 2057 to be safe. It will only be available online and Oxford says it's unlikely ever to be printed. It would be too expensive. The second edition is available online for an annual subscription cost of $90.  I found a compact (and complete) copy of the second edition in a single volume with magnifier on eBay for $119, with free shipping. I have a birthday coming up.

   And speaking of birthdays, it's the birthday of my youngest brother Mark. He's either pouring Bailys into his coffee to celebrate, or else he's piloting his tugboat around New York Harbor. Happy Birthday Mark!

James Murray in the Scriptorium

Mark McDonnell in his Glory