The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  No, nothing that had so far been made was good enough. What was needed was a brand new dictionary. A dictionary of the English language in its totality. Not a reworking of the existing mis-formed and incomplete works; not a further attempt to make any one of the past creations somehow better or more complete; not a supplement, as the Unregistered Words Committee planned to publish. No, from a fresh start, from a tabula rasa, there should be constructed now a wholly new dictionary that would give, in essence and in fact, the meaning of everything.

  Whatever this was, it had to be a book—an enormous book, quite probably, though not even Dean Trench was bold enough to hazard a guess as to how enormous—that did its level best to include the totality of the language. And by that was meant the discovery and the inclusion of every single word, every sense, every meaning. The book had to present a complete inventory of the language—such that anyone who wanted to look up the meaning of any word must be confident of finding it there, without a scintilla of doubt.

  Moreover, the book that Dean Trench had in mind must, he said, be sure to present (unlike Richardson's) an elegantly written and carefully thought out definition, an exquisite summation of every single sense and meaning. It had to offer every variant spelling of every word ever known, as well as its preferred present-day spelling. It had to explain, in detail and as comprehensively as could be ascertained, every single word's etymology. It had to show how best every single form should be pronounced.

  And it had to offer up—Dean Trench here returning to Richardson's `historical principles'—a full-length illustrated biography of every word. The date of each word's birth had to be determined, and a register of the ways in which it grew and evolved and changed itself and its meaning over the years and decades and centuries after its first making. And this should generally all be accomplished without passing judgement on how the word was used—for, said the Dean, now warming to his theme, it had to be understood that `a dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view—and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered may be nearly as instructive as the right ones'.

  The audience must have been startled, perhaps not a little overwhelmed, at the breadth and magisterial challenge of the project that Dean Trench had in mind. This was to be an inventory of all known English words? The meanings and senses were those to be found from the close reading of all of known published English literature? At first blush it seemed too mighty a project for anyone to imagine, let alone to contemplate. And yet as the Dean explained matters in more detail—and as he unveiled his principal idea for the making of something better than all that had gone before, something that he planned to call The New English Dictionary—so the men in their leather chairs began to nod their heads in agreement.

  Yes, they began muttering to one another—this dictionary idea sounded like a scheme that was on just the titanic scale which Victorian Britain seemed these days to be taking in its stride. Was Britain not at the time unquestionably the most powerful nation on earth? Did her navies not sail unchallenged in every ocean between the Poles? Did not a quarter of the world's peoples bow down in abjectness and supplication before Her Majesty?

  And was there not in addition something muscularly Christian about the language that was spoken? (Dean Trench was quite certain that there was.) Might it not be that making an inventory of the language, and by so doing asserting and underlining its greatness, would not just help the English language around the globe? By thus extending its usefulness and ubiquity it would not only spread English influence abroad, but spread the influence of the Church of England into the darkness of the native world as well. Victorian Britain, however absurd and jingoistic it may look through today's more critical lenses, represented an attitude suffused with near-absolute self-confidence and greatness of ambition. It existed at a time of great men, great vision, great achievement—and armed with hopes and intentions spiritual, moral, and commercial, there was almost nothing that it could not do.

  Huge ships, immense palaces, bridges and roads and docks and railways of daunting scale, brave discoveries in science and medicine, scores of colonies seized, dozens of wars won and revolts suppressed, and missionaries and teachers fanning out into the darkest crannies of the planet—there seemed nothing that the Britain of the day could not achieve. And now, to add to it all—a plan for a brand new dictionary. A brand new dictionary of what was, after all, the very language of all this greatness and moral suasion and muscularly Christian goodness, and a language that had been founded and nurtured in the Britain that was doing it— the idea seemed no more and no less than a natural successor to all of these other majestic ventures of iron and steam and fired brick. Yes, the men upstairs in the London Library said, with a growing hubbub of enthused excitement—it could be done. Moreover it should, it must, and it would be done.

  To soothe any lingering doubts about the practicality of the project, Trench finally pulled the rabbit from his hat. He secondguessed his audience when he asked, rhetorically: How shall all these books, in which the meanings of all words resided, be read? This was his reply:

  In that most interesting preface which Jacob Grimm 13 has prefixed to his own and his brother's German dictionary, he makes grateful and honourable mention of no less than eighty-three volunteer coadjutors, who had undertaken to read for him one or more authors, and who had thrown into the common stock of his great work … the results of their several toils. It is something of this common action which the Philological Society has suggested to its members. It entertained, also, from the first a hope, in which it has not been disappointed, that many besides its own members would gladly divide with them the toil and honour of such an undertaking.

  An entire army would join hand in hand till it covered the breadth of the island … this drawing a sweep-net over the whole extent of English literature, is that which we would fain see …

  And all saw that this, at a stroke, was indeed a most brilliant plan. The English-speaking peoples of the world would themselves be asked, begged, cajoled, pleaded with, and otherwise persuaded to join in concert, with the idea of listing the entirety of their very own language. A task which might take one man 100 lifetimes could take 100 men just one, or 1,000 men just a few years. To ask 1,000 to take part should not (the muttering, nodding, clubbably chattering philologists were saying as they filed back out into the fog) be an outlandish notion. This dictionary could well work. It might be three or four volumes in length. It might take five years, or seven, or even ten. But it could be done. Of that, at long last there now was no longer any doubt.

  Moreover, by involving in the making of the lexicon the very people who spoke and read the language, the project would be of the people, a scheme that, quite literally, would be classically democratic. The book that Dean Trench had in mind was not the prescriptive invention of one man, nor even of a small number of men, nor of a committee. It would instead be a descriptive creation from all men; it would reflect the people's words and the people's uses of them, and so be in yet more ways unlike any other dictionary ever made. It was a quite astonishing and revolutionary dream.

  All that remained to lift this project from the idylls of drawingroom conversation and lecture-theatre dialogue to firm and effective action was a plan. As it happened, one was to come about in very short order.

  A year after Dean Trench's speech, the Society passed a formal resolution to the effect that A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles was to be undertaken; a year later still the plan was devised, printed, and published. In the early summer of 1860 the Rules for the making of the great book—the Canones Lexicographici—were published too—giving instructions for attending to the minutiae that lay ahead.

  The plan was for a very different book from that which was eventually to be created. The first idea was for a dictionary in three parts, with Part I containing most words, Part II holding technical words and proper names, and Part III the etymologies of all the words contained in the
first two parts. But whether or not that plan was adhered to, the moment it was published, and a road-map for the journey had been officially made, so the boiler then fired; the steam-pump turned; the gearwheels meshed, and the whole laborious and pioneering process of making the dictionary to end all dictionaries was finally set in motion.

  It was 12 May 1860—and though most of those involved thought their work would come to fruition within the following decade, it was in fact to be 68 years and three weeks from that starting date before the great work finally saw the light of day. The Rules were in place, the team was assembled, and now, that late spring day, the clock had finally started ticking.

  2

  The Construction of the Pigeon-Holes

  I believe that the scheme is now firmly established … and I confidently expect … that in about two years we shall be able to give our first number to the world. Indeed, were it not for the dilatoriness of many contributors, I should not hesitate to name an earlier period.

  (Herbert Coleridge, first editor of

  The New English Dictionary, 30 May 1860)

  The great fact … is, that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which fortyeight columns have reached me in proof.

  (James Murray, third editor of

  The New English Dictionary, 19 May 1882)

  Almost 22 years separate this pair of laconic announcements, more than two decades dividing wish from fulfilment, man's hopeful proposal of the plan from cool disposal of it by God or the Fates. Those who were so eagerly hoping for the Dictionary to appear were obliged to endure what was, by any standards, a long, long wait. The first years of the project were, in short, a most frustrating time. They were years marked by periods of hesitation and uncertainty, by outbursts of anger, threats of abandonment, frustrated argumentation, and (in one case) untimely and inconvenient death. Only in the later years, once a proper sense of organization had finally gripped the near-foundering project, were there any signs of progress and real achievement.

  What in those early years was familiarly known as `the Philological Society's Dictionary' had in essence three founding fathers—Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall. They were men of strikingly different backgrounds and attitudes, united only by their fondness and fascination for the language; 1 their variety of styles lent much, of both benefit and disbenefit, to the early workings of what, it fast became clear, was going to be a most formidable enterprise.

  Richard Chenevix Trench came from a distinguished Irish clerical family, 2 was intellectually stellar enough to have been made a member of the Cambridge Apostles at Trinity, and was, at first, an unstinting admirer of Spanish literature. While still a youngster he seems to have been briefly infected with a heady sense of idealism: he flitted off to Spain to fight as a volunteer for the liberal insurrectionary Jose Torrijos, participating in a valiant attack on Cadiz—returning to London unscathed but apparently deeply embarrassed. It was, so far as one can tell from his admiring biographers, the only time in his life that he displayed the merest trace of foolhardiness, levity, or frivolity. As his family expected of him, Trench promptly entered the Church of England on his return home, and casting all romantic notions aside for good, duly progressed up the ecclesiastical ladder with efficiency and dispatch. He first became a deacon at Norwich Cathedral, went briefly back to Ireland to help famine victims as a curate in the parish of Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, then took up the post of curate in Colchester, and subsequently became perpetual curate of Curbridge, in the see of Winchester. It was during the six years that he spent here in Hampshire that he developed his reputation as a scholar, a liberal-minded reformer (becoming a fast friend of William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner), a poet and—most significantly in this context—a philologist. He lectured widely on the nature and origins of the language, and, being a quick study, published three popular and well-regarded short books during the 1850s, The Study of Words, English Past and Present, and A Select Glossary. 3 After a curiously extended delay he joined the (by nowfifteen-year-old) Philological Society in 1857—having been elected Dean of Westminster the year before—and for a while ran the Unregistered Words Committee for the Society from his official residence just beside Westminster Abbey. 4 He then, as already mentioned, gave the two-part lecture on the shortcomings of existing dictionaries at the London Library in November 1857, which set in motion the plan for creating the great newreplacement. Once the Society agreed on the idea, he promptly formed two committees—one on etymology, one on word history and literature—and for a while ran these, also, from Dean's Yard.

  But before long the relentless press of his diocesan work proved too time-consuming, and within a few short months he told his colleagues that he could no longer continue: from henceforward, he said, work on the new book would continue under the editorship of Herbert Coleridge—and all correspondence on the matter would pass to him, at his elegant four-storey pale yellow mansion on the east side of Regent's Park, Chester Terrace. There have been many addresses associated over time with the making of the Dictionary: No. 10 Chester Terrace, London NW, is in all probability the one that most properly can lay claim to being its birthplace.

  The man who was technically the book's first editor, Herbert Coleridge (though he is rarely identified as such in most of the official publications), was far from being a middle-aged divine: at the time of the founding of the Philological Society he was just twelve years old, and when Trench made his Guy Fawkes Day speech, a mere 27. He had been elected to the Society that same February, swiftly impressing all around him with his curiously precocious erudition: he won a stunning double first degree in classics and mathematics at Balliol College, he had become a barrister, he was quite ostentatiously obsessed with the byways of philology, most notably with the finer points of Sanskrit, the languages of Norway and Finland, and the dialects of Iceland. He had a small annuity, which allowed him to indulge his philology more keenly than his law.

  The first editor was Herbert Coleridge, only 27 years old, a grandson of the poet. He was a scholarly and sickly figure, and had sent the first sample pages to press when he caught a chill and died, a year into the project.

  As soon as he had won entry to the Philological Society Coleridge started writing papers for its well-regarded Transactions—a first essay on the nature of the diminutive formed by the addition of -let (he wondered why, for instance, a small river was called a rivulet, and not a riverlet ), and another on the Latin words ploro and exploro. His very evident erudition (and the fact that he was the grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) attracted Dean Trench's attention; and when Trench felt pressed by his churchly duties to bowout of the day-to-day running of the project, it was to the ever-eager young man that he first turned. Such files as the Unregistered Words Committee had collected were promptly shipped from Dean's Yard to Chester Terrace, and the dictionary work began anew, under the captaincy of a younger man.

  Younger, but not fitter, Herbert Coleridge turned out to be a sickly figure, plagued by what was once called consumption but which nowadays is more generally known as pulmonary tuberculosis. The image of him that filters down through the years is of a workaholic, rarely straying from his chambers, poring unhealthily over his correspondence, his lists of words and his organizational plans, while he coughed and vomited and wheezed and in alarmingly short order grew ever weaker and weaker.

  His accomplishments made under these trying circumstances, though they are widely forgotten today, are far from trivial. With the help of a committee he drewup the Canones—the Rules—by which the three-part dictionary he envisaged might be created. He divided the books that were to be read into three groups—those appearing between 1250 and the publication of the first English NewTestament in 1526; those published between 1526 and Milton's death in 1674; and those printed between then and 1858, when the project was formally set under way. He also found in the famed Nicholas Trübner a printer and publisher 5 —a
rather premature arrangement, even the most optimistic might think—who would be able to perform the intricate work that a dictionary, with its countless typefaces and foreign languages and phonetic alphabets, required.

  In addition Coleridge organized the first small army of volunteer readers—he wrote around to schools and universities and members of the Society and their friends, and within a year managed to find no fewer than 147 men (and a small number of women) who happily agreed to help find quotations showing a variety of words in contexts that the editor should find illustrated their various meanings and senses. But their ardour quickly cooled. Of these first 147, the editor reported dejectedly in May 1860, only some 89 were still working—the early enthusiasm of the other 58 (he dismissed them as `hopeless') had clearly evaporated.