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HISTORY
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
Sarah Ogilvie
Chatto & Windus, $35
Autobibliogenesis. There ought to be a word for the process whereby one book appears to spontaneously generate others. If there were a Guinness listing for the most prolific exemplar of the phenomenon, surely The Oxford English Dictionary would be among its leading claimants.
From The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998) to Australian Pip Williams’ luminous 2020 novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and Caught in the Web of Words, a biography of James Murray, its most celebrated editor, the OED has spawned titles across a broad spectrum of genres.
Sir James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, surrounded by files of word definitions.Credit: Getty Images
The Dictionary People, by Australian-raised lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie, is the latest addition to this august company. She has been an editor on the world’s largest dictionary of English, and before that was Chief Editor of Oxford dictionaries in Australia.
The Oxford English Dictionary was the first lexicon to trace the evolution of words down the centuries; and first to base its citations on a form of crowdsourcing, inviting readers worldwide to locate the earliest written examples for every entry and shade of meaning.
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Ogilvie’s work stems from a serendipitous find: a discarded volume that turned out to contain Murray’s address books – identifying 3000 contributors who provided the building blocks of the masterwork that took up 40 years of his life and was only completed, with the last word (zyxt: an obsolete Kentish word meaning: “[Thou] seest.“) printed in 1928, 13 years after his death.
Chasing words may be an intellectual pursuit but it is hardly arid, and occasionally lends itself to pathos. In 1906 the widow of William Sykes from South Devon wrote to Murray that he had been working on a dictionary entry the Friday morning prior and died that evening, so “The last words he ever wrote were to you”.
Ogilvie cleverly (and logically) divides her work into 26 letter-headed chapters. H is for “Hopeless Contributors”, thus defined by successive editors. Some refused to send in their citation slips; others produced slipshod work; a few, to whom Murray had sent specially selected volumes, promised much but produced nothing. Picture the steam rising from the “Scriptorium”, where the editors worked, as he wrote against the name T.W. Tonkin of Barnes, “Impostor – Stole the Book”.
A more diligent sleuth was Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, who committed suicide after learning that the love of her life had secretly wed another. One contribution of hers made it into the dictionary only this century: the verb ruffle, from a Madame Bovary citation.
William Chester Minor, prolific contributor to the OED and inmate in the Broadmoor asylum in Crowthorne.Credit:
The “surgeon” of Crowthorne, aka an inmate at that town’s “insane asylum”, American William Chester Minor, was not the only “lunatic” (using the word in its 19th-century acceptation) engaged as a researcher. Three of the four most prolific contributors were asylum inmates, the fourth ran one. As Ogilvie appositely asks: “Was it their madness that drove them to do so much Dictionary work, or was it the Dictionary work that drove them mad?”
This book should be a desideratum for lovers of new words, or even old ones that fell out of, or were never in, fashion: such as superexalt (to overpraise). Some will like it for the words themselves, others for the characters who defined them. Ogilvie puts some remarkable specimens of humanity under her microscope.
Religion and sex nestle under the covers. More than 10 per cent of Dictionary People were clergymen (too much time on their hands?). A vegetarian vicar, John Mayor, oversaw new words for meat abstainers, depositing fruitarian and nutarian in the word salad bowl. And then there was Henry Spencer Ashbee, who boasted of owning the world’s largest collection of pornography and erotica.
By the late Victorian era, when the word hunt was in full use, Australia was no longer a convict destination, but it could still serve as a refuge, as Ogilvie explains: “Miss Edith Lucas of High Wycombe had ‘gone to Melbourne’ and was never heard of again.”
An especially zealous contributor to the OED (now halfway through its third edition), Chris Collier, hailed from Brisbane, the author’s hometown. He produced 100,000 slips from 1975-2010, among them: kit off (naked); sea changer; snaky, petrolhead. The OED accepted them all, but rejected a parochial favourite, Brizvegas.
Whether it’s words or people that float your boat, this stimulating compendium is – whatever other descriptives you might use – hard to superexalt.
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