The Oxford English Dictionary

The year was 1857 and the Philological Society of London was dissatisfied with the current English dictionaries. An "Unregistered Words Committee" was formed to search for unlisted and undefined words, those lacking in current dictionaries. The project was conceived by Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall. Trench was Dean of Westminster and published paper "On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries" (whose second version is available on Google Books), which he read before the Philological Society.

In the study, Trench identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:

- Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
- Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
- Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
- History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
- Inadequate distinction among synonyms
- Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
- Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.

The first head of the project,
Richard Chenevix Trench

The Philological Society tried to cover these points, but ultimately concluded that the number of unlisted words would be far greater that the number of words in the English dictionaries of that time. So the focus was shifted to a more panoptic project: the making of of a true comprehensive dictionary. Books were allotted to volunteer readers, who would copy to quotation slips passages exhibiting actual word usage. Before the end of 1857, philologist Herbert Coleridge reported that 77 individuals had come forward to collect evidence for the Unregistered Words Committee. The project started on January 7, 1858 and was named “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles”.

Richard Chenevix Trench organized the early stages of the project but was not able to continue it. Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On 12th May, 1860, Coleridge’s dictionary plan was published and his team started the research. He made his house his first office. In May 1861, Herbert Coleridge died of tuberculosis.

Editor Frederick Furnivall, 1825–1910

After that, Frederick Furnivall became the editor, but he was not able to keep his workers spurred. He understood the need for a proficient excerpting system, and finally started several precursory projects. One of them was the Early English Text Society, founded in 1864 to publish unprinted early English literature to help with the quotation selection – it reprinted works that in the time were already printed elsewhere but were unobtainable except in limited and expensive editions.

Furnivall managed to recruit over 800 volunteers to read texts and record quotations. In the end, he handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor, James Murray, who became the editor in 1870.

James Murray, editor and philologist

James Murray is the most celebrated editor of the OED and is considered the one who made the greatest contributions. He devoted 36 years of his life to the dictionary and, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was personally responsible for "more than half of the English vocabulary, comprising all the words beginning with the letters A-D, H-K, O-P, and all but a fraction of those beginning with T". He also provided a model methodology and set the standards that would make the OED the world-renowned resource it became.

When Murray became the editor, there was no defined publisher for the gigantic dictionary. Only in 1878 did Furnivall and Murray find a publisher that agreed with the project: Oxford University Press. It took 20 years for the colossus project to have a publisher. And it would only be completed 50 years later.

The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published in February of 1884 and covered from “A” to “Ant”. In the first seven years of work, the editors didn't get past the letter "b". The dictionary’s ambitious intention was to record every word used in English since 1150 and trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest recorded appearance, plus at least one citation for each century of its existence. In the end, it became twenty ponderous volumes long, with 615,000 entries; 2,412,000 supporting quotations, and 60,000,000 words.

The Oxford English Dictionary was the first modern English dictionary ever made and it set a new standard for what dictionaries would be from then on.  To this date, it is considered "the ultimate authority on the usage and meaning of English words and phrases, unparalleled in its accuracy and comprehensiveness".

Curious Facts:

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to 'key in' the text to convert the 59 million words in the second edition of OED into machine readable format, followed by 60 years of proofreading and requiring 540 megabytes of electornic storage space.

One of the thousands of contributors of the OED was Fritzeward Hall, who spoke nine languages and "wrote every single day ... with sheet after sheet of proofs, corrected, changed, closely read and carefully parsed."

William Chester Minor was also a prolific contributor. He was a retired United States Army surgeon and was, at the time of his contribution, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. His story was told in book The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words, written by Simon Winchester, first published in England in 1998 and then retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada (the 'professor' of the American title is James Murray).

Author J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the making OED. He was employed in 1919 and concentrated mostly on letter "W" (warm, wasp, water, wick, wallop, waggle, winter). He said that during the time he worked on the OED, he learned more "than (at) any other equal period of my life."

According to book “The Meaning Of Everything - The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary”, also by Simon Winchester, to Murray the hardest word was “set”. “Black” was also a difficult one, taking one assistant three months to work out.

The very last word in the 1928 edition was zyxt: a Kentish word, past participle of the verb to see.

Sources and related links:

Trench Anniversary, by Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor of OED
http://www.philsoc.org.uk/history.asp
History of the OED
http://www.oed.com/public/oedhistory
Origins of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1857)
http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?id=3400
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
History of the Oxford English Dictionary, OED
http://wordinfo.info/unit/4420/ip:4/il:H
Oxford English Dictionary
http://my-bankruptcy-help.com/?b=Oxford_English_Dictionary#cite_note-2
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Murray
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/35163.html
The Origin of – Oxford Dictionary
http://www.theoriginof.com/oxford-dictionary.html
The Meaning of Everything – Review
http://www.ralphmag.org/CI/oed.html
How a new word enters the Oxford English Dictionary:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/02/how-new-word-enters-dictionary/
About the OED
http://oed.com/public/about;jsessionid=4DEC019A8646FA6178E3066784268FB1