Edition: U.S. / Global

You Could Look It Up

By William F. Buckley Jr.
Published: October 12, 2003



The Story of the

Oxford English Dictionary.

By Simon Winchester.

Illustrated. 260 pp. New York:

Oxford University Press. $25.

IN 1875, more than 15 years after the Philological Society of London had set out to assemble a new English dictionary, the incumbent editor, Frederick Furnivall, acknowledged that he had simply bogged down. New blood was needed. A member of the society came across a 10-year-old application for employment in the British Museum Library. The applicant was one James Murray, son of a linen draper, sometime bank clerk, now 38 years old and seeking extra work to supplement his meager earnings from the Mill Hill School, where he was teaching schoolboys while raising his own 11 children.

The library hadn't hired him -- perhaps because he didn't have a college degree. We get from his application an idea of the range and extent of linguistic learning of a single, modest, semiemployed polymath in mid-19th-century Britain. Murray would be qualified, Furnivall decided, to play a part in the realization of the mind-bending new dictionary. He sent around to his confederates copies of the application letter to the library.


Enough said? No. There was the itchy problem of the absent college degree. So it was discreetly arranged, by an advocate of Murray among the Philological Society's members, that he receive one, an honorary LL.D. from Scotland. This was done in recognition of a book written by Murray in his spare time, ''The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland.'' Meanwhile, the dictionary enterprise had stalled under the maladministration of Furnivall, and simultaneously there was the unsettled question of who exactly would emerge as an appropriate publisher-patron. The society wanted a firm connection with a creditable and resourceful institution. The project whiffed by the elders of Cambridge, who turned it down (''the largest wrong decision in publishing history,'' the editor of the Cambridge press wrote some years later). Several associations were considered, and the possibility that the arrangement would be profitable was stressed, due note being taken of the 4,000-page Littré French dictionary, published in Paris at the price of £4, which had sold a staggering 40,000 copies.

The society's proposal was more comprehensive, there being no British language authority that authorized a word or prescribed its meaning. The language had been growing pell-mell, identifiable words and their uses doubling in number from the Renaissance. In the O.E.D. the word ''set'' consumes 24 pages, the most devoted to a single word. Johnson defined a mere 43,000 words, Webster 70,000, and by the 19th century the guess was that there had to be considerably more.

The English language is a cascade of words and meanings and usages, and the formidable idea was to capture them all. This would mean, ultimately, a never-ending enterprise, which the O.E.D. now is. But it happened little by little. In 1878 the beleaguered Furnivall was ready to make a formal suggestion to the society, which was that James Augustus Henry Murray be appointed editor and that negotiations with Oxford should be pursued.

The members of the society were mostly scholarly and affluent connoisseurs who had taken a learned interest in the proposal to create, as it was designated, ''A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles Formed Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society and With the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science.'' It had emerged from the drawing boards revolutionary in scope. Every word since the Norman invasion -- every word that had more than purely transient life -- would be included, and also its etymology and pronunciation, together with examples of how the word had been used, and in which senses, if more than one. Could this ambition be realized? And was James Murray the right man to bring in as commander in chief?