Today is the 91st birthday of the Oxford English dictionary. It was first published on the 15th of February 1928 and took 70 years to complete! Here’s a magazine article I did to celebrate the 90th birthday of the dictionary. Click below to see a PDF of the article as it appeared in the magazine, keep scrolling for a text only version.
The Dictionary – Happy Birthday
The Dictionary – Text only version:
Dictionary – a book in which words are listed alphabetically and explained, or equivalent words are given in another language. From the Latin ‘dictio’ meaning word or phrase.
Just think about it for a moment. Where would you start? Do you start at Aardvark and go alphabetically? Or do you just define things as you come across them. For that matter, how do you actually define something? How would you describe an item or word in such a way that everybody else who reads it will understand what it is that you are defining? While the Oxford English Dictionary may be the most prestigious or most frequently quoted lexicon, it is a part of an evolutionary process that started almost 300 years ago.
Published in April 1755 written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson’s Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. Johnson’s dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being Latin-English “wordbook” by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538. Perhaps the greatest single fault of these early lexicographers was, as historian Henry Hitchings put it, that they “failed to give sufficient sense of the English Language as it appeared in use.” In that sense Dr Johnson’s dictionary was the first to really document the spoken English language.
Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire. He displayed signs of great intelligence as a child, his parents, to his later disgust, would show off his newly acquired accomplishments. He was initially home schooled but from the time he turned 4 he was sent to nearby school; at the age of six he was sent to a retired shoemaker to continue his education. Samuel developed tics that would influence how some people viewed him in later years; these tics have been posthumously diagnosed as Tourettes syndrome. Johnson’s dictionary was prepared at 17 Gough Square, London, between the years of 1746 and 1755. By 1747 Johnson had written his plan of a Dictionary of the English Language. A dictionary of the English Language was large and very expensive. It’s pages were 18 inches (46cm) tall and nearly 20 inches (50cm) wide. The paper was the finest quality available, the cost of which ran to nearly £1,600; more than Johnson had been paid to write the book. Johnson himself pronounced the book “Vasta mole uperbus” (“proud in it’s great bulk”). No bookseller could possibly hope to print this book without help; outside a few special editions of the Bible no book of this heft and size had even been set to type.
The title page read:
A
DICTIONARY
of the
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
in which
The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS,
and
ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNFICATIONS
by
EXAMPLES from the beft WRITERS.
To which are prefixed,
A HISTORY of the LANGUAGE,
and AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR.
By SAMUEL JOHNSON, A.M.
In TWO volumes
VOL. I
The first edition of the dictionary contained a 42,773 word list, to which only a few more were added to subsequent editions. One of Johnson’s important innovations was to illustrate the meanings of his words with over 114,000 literary quotations.
For example;
OPULENCE – Wealth; riches; affluence
“There in full opulence a banker dwelt”
For almost 100 years, Johnson’s was accepted as the best available dictionary and there was little appetite for anybody to try to improve on his work. Samuel Johnson’s definitions had a hugely varied style, some were whimsical:
“Lexicographer” – a writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing he original and detailing the signification of words.”Oats” – a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
While some definitions were fanatically detailed:
“Turn” had 16 definitions & 15 illustrations
“Time” had 20 definitions & 14 illustrations
“Take” had 134 definitions at 8,000 words
When it was published in four volumes the dictionary was greeted as a huge academic success and Johnson was lauded as a literary hero, but the prohibitive cost meant that he continued to live in relative poverty until finally, in 1762 he was granted a pension by the 24 year old King George III. While his work had many detractors, by the end of the century they were outnumbered by Johnson’s admirers. By the 1770’s, if one asked for The Dictionary it was Johnson’s work that would be universally provided.
The famous Blackadder sketch that featured Robbie Coltrane as Johnson has some root in history for there are many examples of people suggesting words to Johnson that he may have missed or could have better defined. For example, his friend, Boswell recounts an occasion when a lady approached Johnson and asked him how he had come to define ‘pastern’ as the knee of a horse. The lady seemed set to receive an elaborate reply but was disappointed when Johnson merely said, “Ignorance Madam. Pure Ignorance.”
Despite the criticism he received, his work became the basis for all future dictionaries and was the benchmark for over 100 years until the language had moved on enough to spur the next generation of lexicographers into action. But they had learned that compiling any dictionary was more work than one man should ever undertake.
In 1844 when three members of a Phililogical Society; Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Furnivall all expressed dissatisfaction with the dictionaries available at that time. Language had evolved in the 100 years which saw Johnson’s works being effectively out of date. They intended to form an ‘Unregistered Words Committee’ but soon realised that there were far more unlisted words than there were in existing dictionaries! In 1858 the committee , they set about compiling a ‘New Truly Comprehensive Dictionary’. Trench and his team knew that the work might not be completed in their lifetime which saw the committee falling under the remit of Oxford University for continuity.
It took 70 years until the 125th sub-section covering from ‘Wise to the end of W’ was completed and the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary was published. In 1933 and with the dictionary measuring 12 volumes, Oxford finally put the work to rest. However, the English language continued to change and within 20 years the dictionary was out of date again! There was an argument to just print separate periodical updates with changed words, but this would mean having to check definitions in multiple places. In 1957 they opted to re-edit and expand future editions to also include words from English speaking regions outside of the UK. This saw the full OED rising to 17 volumes by 1972.
Then in the early 1983 work began to computerise the works which saw 120 typists entering 350,000,000 characters that were checked by 55 proof-readers. This work ran on until 1989. This became known as the full and final OED, it covered twenty volumes in print and was named OED1. Since then, much work has been done to remove archaic language and to make definitions more concise, with many different styles of OED readily available. With all of the final alterations completed, the OED2 was published in 1989 and has been described as the “greatest publishing event of the 20th Century” and a “Scholarly Everest”. While the printed versions are periodically updated, every year the OED announce lists of words that have been added to OR removed from their lexicon. It has been proposed that the words Gullible and Naïve should be removed from the next edition of Oxford English Dictionary.
