The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  (Few readers, at least in those early days, seemed to admit to coming from France and Italy, however. One has to assume, if unkindly, that those living under the heel of firmly prescriptive linguistic authorities like the Forty Immortals of the Académie in Paris and the members of the Accademia of Florence, were a little unsure how prudent it might be to read for a book that would be so wildly different in its constitution from those they were used to.)

  In any event, the speed of the response was staggering. Within a month of sending out the pamphlet Murray was able to report that 165 people had signed up to do work; 128 of them had chosen the books they were going to read (a total of 234 books had been sent off); all had been sent their slips 6 and so were now presumed to be beavering away. Some who had volunteered to read very large or important books—such as the fourteenth-century northern poem the Cursor Mundi, which in time became the most-quoted work in the entire OED—were sent pre-printed slips, designed by Murray to free these particular volunteers from the labours of writing each time the title and the edition for each of the quotations they found.

  A year later the number of readers had more than quadrupled, to 754; 1,568 books had been sent for reading, and 934 of these had been thoroughly combed through and finished. This was work on a scale and at a pace of which Coleridge and Furnivall had never dreamed: within just a year of signature of the contract the number of quotations returned on slips had increased by 361,670, and a year later still, by 656,900. Within a matter of months a further ton of material had been received in the Scriptorium, and Murray and his tiny band of workers were kept furiously busy sifting, sorting, and deciding, day after day after day.

  Indeed, the first three or four years of the enterprise in Mill Hill were completely dominated by the seemingly incessant processes of sorting and classifying slips and then reading the quotations written on them. The idea of actually producing even the first volume of the mighty work seemed still very distant, no more than a chimera, a mirage, a phantasm.

  About 1,000 slips arrived at the Scriptorium every single day. Each time a packet of slips was received—maybe one particular reader had sent but a single slipin his envelope, more probably he had saved up his efforts and sent in a brown-paper parcel that held fifty or more—it was opened up, and the slips examined to see if there was any egregious error—an obviously misspelled word, say, or if a reference was clearly less full than would be useful. If that were the case, the slipwould be set aside and Murray would write a letter asking the reader to rectify matters.

  Then the sorters—two young Mill Hill village women employed, a Miss Skipper and Miss Scott, at fifteen shillings a week—arranged the slips into the alphabetical order of their headwords. The two were the uneducated daughters of local tradesmen, and they cheerfully admitted little knowledge of what it was that they were sorting; but they learned an extraordinary dexterity in shuffling the slips into order, and proved themselves invaluable. 7

  After these, in the ascendant pecking order, came the rather more learned (and, as it happens, male) helpers, like the thusfar-unmasked kleptomaniac Mr Herrtage, or James Murray's brother-in-law Herbert Ruthven, Alfred Erlebach, and John Mitchell (who was to be killed mountain climbing in Snowdonia). This team looked closely at each headword and sorted those that were spelled the same way into their different parts of speech—for example, lie the verb, as in to lie down, or lie the noun as in falsehood. Once this was done, the slips were further arranged within the new categories such that the quotations written on them were in chronological order.

  A selection of slips—some handwritten, some cut from books, some printed—for the word mechnical, which would have been housed in the Scriptorium pigeonholes,

  waiting to be examined, considered and finally perhaps used in the pages of the Dictionary.

  The most crucial stage came next. An editor-sorter of even more experience—James Murray being primus inter pares, of course—would then look carefully at the quotations and from them attempt to discern the differences in the meanings and senses that the quotations showed had been used over the centuries. For an important word there might be several hundred quotations—and it would only be by the very slow and painstaking reading of these quotations that a skilled editor could discern, could see in his mind's eye, the various ways the words had been employed over the centuries.

  Sometimes the differences were obvious; sometimes they were more subtle; occasionally the differences were the merest shadings of meaning, the discernment and determining and defining of which were to make this one dictionary so infinitely superior to all others. And to make sure the quotations did each reflect the meaning that a sagacious editor thought they did, each and every quotation would have to be checked. Was what the volunteer reader had written accurate? Was the date he had assigned to it correct? If there were errors here, then the whole basis of the definition and the history of the word would be thrown into disarray, and any dictionary based on such inaccuracy would be made useless. Checking and rechecking the original sources, however tedious it might seem, and however seemingly disrespectful to the volunteers, was essential.

  The assistants—or the sub-editors or that special sub-class called re-sub-editors—who did all these determinings would pin together the slips that fed into each category of meaning and attach with the same pin 8 a piece of paper that showed a first attempt at a definition of what the slips' quotations appeared to show the word to mean. And then the sub-editor would take all the small pinned bundles for any one word and arrange these bundles chronologically, so that the lexical history of the word could be ascertained as well.

  Finally in this multi-layered process, the gently fierce-looking, pepper-and-salt-bearded (the red had faded to brown and was now beginning to grey itself ), and black-velvet-capped James Murray, working steadily away upon his foot-high dais and from behind a semicircular and seemingly machicolated fortress wall of reference books, would receive the pinned bundles. He would make such further subdivisions as might seem to him appropriate, work into the mix the etymology of each word, add its alternate spellings and then the way that the Philological Society and common sense suggested that it might best be pronounced. He would number the bundles from 1 to 1,000 (in case they were ever to be dropped by a clumsy sub-editor or a compositor), and eventually he would perform the most important of all the tasks that a dictionary editor must accomplish—he would write and polish and fuss with and burnish, for each one of the words and senses and meanings, what he divined as their definitions.

  Defining words is a rare and special art. Some rules for the process have evolved, the earliest of them Aristotelian in origin. A word—let us take the noun 9 cow as an example—must first be defined according to the class of things, by the genus, to which the chosen meaning belongs (mammal, quadruped, hooved), and then differentiated—defined by differentiae, in Aristotelian terms—from other members of its class (bovine, female). The definition must be written to show what the thing signified by the word is, and not what it is not. And all the words used in the definition must appear elsewhere in the dictionary, so that any reader's puzzlement can be rectified by his simply looking those up as well—to repeat, the rule of thumb has it that no word in the definition should be more complicated than the word that is being defined. (Samuel Johnson broke this rule on numerous occasions. In his definition of the word elephant, for example, he writes of the animal's pudicity— few know at first blush that this word means shyness, making the definition, and thus by extension Johnson's entire dictionary—less than ideal. Which is, of course, what Dean Trench pointed out in his famous paper of 1857.)

  James Murray's definition of cow (or one of its many meanings—cow has about nine, though cower has only two) is a model of elegant simplicity, as were most of the hundreds of thousands he wrote: `The female of any bovine animal (as the ox, bison or buffalo); most commonly applied to the female of the domestic species (Bos taurus).'

  Once having completed his definition, and having assem
bled in bundles enough work to make the next part of the venture worthwhile, he would tie them together, place them in a large brown package marked, triumphally, with the simple word `Press'—and send them post-haste to the printers.

  Murray's son Wilfrid, who spent much of his adult life in Cape Town, employed a delightful South African English word inspan— it means to yoke upa team of oxen or horses, and it has outspan as its opposite—to describe how the editor would employ his children in the service of the Dictionary. `They were inspanned', he writes, `as soon as they were of an age to be trusted.' What he meant was that as soon as they seemed able to read they were asked to report to the door of the `iron room' (the inside of what their father called the Scriptorium was out of bounds to them), collect from an assistant some newly arrived packets of slips, and take them back to the Sunnyside breakfast room for sorting.

  `We received no pocket money as a matter of course,' wrote Jowett, the youngest Murray boy, `but had to earn it by sorting slips.'

  Hours & hours of our childhood were spent in this useful occupation. The motive actuating us was purely mercenary: we wanted money for our Christmas or our birthday presents, or to spend on our summer holidays, & the only way to get it was to sort slips. We were paid according to age, not according to skill or speed. The standard rate was one penny an hour, but this rose to two-pence, threepence or even sixpence, as you mounted up in your teens.

  Wilfrid, who sounds to have been something of a playroom lawyer, brought in a spoof bill to regulate the practice, reading it as a motion before what was called the Sunnyside Debating Society. He called it the Appropriation Act, and it read: `That the members of this House to steadily henceforth keepto the work of half an hour's slips per day for the gain of sixpence a week.' The children passed it nem con. James Murray appears not to have taken the slightest notice of it. Jowett was obliged to continue writing his description of the trials of the task:

  The sorting into first letters was easiest: that into second letters was a little harder, because you often had to read the whole catchword. The final sorting and combining two or perhaps three bundles were hardest of all; but we became very skillful with practice &, I believe, quite as quick as the junior assistants in the Scriptorium. … Financially considered, I am sure the Oxford University Press did very well by our labour.

  The work was not uninteresting if done for only an hour or two at a time. But when we wanted to earn half a crown or even five shillings in the space of a week, we had to work long hours. We enlivened the task by reading out tit-bits from Dr. Furnivall's newspaper cuttings, & bundles of slips from Dr. Furnivall were in demand, in spite of the bad handwriting.

  However, just as at first with the poor Misses Skipper and Scott, none of the labour of the young Murrays was to be publicly acknowledged. It seems a rather ungracious Victorian attitude, but evidently one that had precious little to do with gender. More than likely this conferring of invisibility was just the result of James Murray's whims and caprices, and not based in any kind of settled policy.

  There was, though, one unforeseen bonus to be derived from all their labours. In their old age, and when such puzzles became a regular feature in the newspapers, the Murray children turned out to be brilliantly adept at solving crosswords. They also—though this could perhaps hardly be termed a bonus—derived from their work one splendid phrase of insult. They had found the word toerag in one of Furnivall's newspaper cuttings, and decided to make adolescent use of it themselves. The halls of Sunnyside would resound with cries of `You dirty toe-rag!'

  And all the while, Murray was inching towards the moment when he would be able to offer uphis first publication—the first real indication of progress, and one which he could share with all the interested world.

  He began working on his words at what suddenly seems to have been a rare old clip. As early as May 1879—not three months following his appointment—he had advanced from the letter A 10 as far as Aby, covering 557 words, which made upenough copy (depending on the design, the number of columns, the size of the typeface) for perhaps 36 pages of the completed Dictionary. By May 1880 he had struggled through a further 124 pages, reaching as far as Al-. In 1881 (by which time he had sent out fifteen hundredweight of paper, in the shape of 817,625 of the pre-printed slips, to his readers) he had begun thinking seriously about typography, and in June 1881 there was talk of making specimen pages.

  The design of the Dictionary occupied his mind for many months—and the fact that the design he eventually came up with has lasted for so very long since those Mill Hill ponderings points up the extraordinary prescience of Murray as a bookmaker, as well as a lexicographer. For in all his decisions he seems to have achieved a rare perfection—the form of the book is one that no designer since has had reasons either to tinker with or to complain about.

  The Periodical, the in-house journal of Oxford University Press, understandably gave much of the credit to their own printers, who were regarded as men possessed of an unusual degree of skill and taste. Their compositors and readers, said the journal, puffing out its chest, had bestowed the greatest care upon the Dictionary:

  The variety of type used, the many languages involved, and the multiplication of `arbitraries' 11 have demanded technical knowledge and minute accuracy to an extent probably unequalled in any other work. The typographical superiority of the Oxford Dictionary over works of comparable scope is everywhere acknowledged. One has but to turn to great books like Littré and Grimm to be impressed once again with the choice of type and the disposition of the page which have made the Oxford book easy and pleasant to read.

  Whether it was Murray who made the final design decision or the then Printer to the University, Edward Pickard Hall, is a little difficult to discern. 12 And certainly the celebrated Vice-Chancellor of the University and Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett—for whom there was a rhyme using his name and which ended `there is no knowledge but I know it'—was deeply (and, to Murray, annoyingly) involved as well. But whoever of these was properly responsible for the look of the finished product, the result was then, and remains today, unutterably pleasing.

  The book is laid out in three columns, each essentially ten inches tall and two-and-a-half inches wide. The body type is a classic British Imperial-era face called Clarendon, which had been designed and the punches cut in 1845 by Benjamin Fox for Robert Besley at London's renowned Fann Street Foundry: it used boldface for the headwords, and then a variety of styles (light and italic among them) and a variety of fount sizes for the various elements that Murray decided required illustration. 13 The definitions are set in Old Style; the quotations in a smaller fount size of the same. All kinds of typographical device—daggers, parallels, inferior and superior stress marks, numbers—are there to mark various elements of each word. A bewildering variety of other typefaces are used as well—not the least of them Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, Greek, and the various symbols of Old English (such as thorns, yoghs, wyns, ashes, and eths), and, in the dictionary section that is devoted to what lexicographers call `orthoepy', and which all else call `correct pronunciation', the equally arcane and irritatingly non-intuitive symbols of the phonetic alphabet.

  It was on 19 April 1882 that Murray sent off a first batch of all-butfinished copy to the Clarendon Press printing house at Oxford. Things were now moving, and in terms of the glacier-like mobility of the dictionary world, they were moving fast. Some days later, in early May 1882, he signalled the epochal moment of possible publication to his fellow members of the Philological Society. It had been three years since his appointment as editor: now at last he was able to employ the words that have been already used as the epigraph to Chapter 2: `The great fact … is, that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which forty-eight columns have reached me in proof.'

  Since he was now in the business of editing the book, rather than collecting material for it, he decided that he could now call a halt—or at least a temporary halt—to the main volu
nteer reading programme. `The general amassing of quotations must cease with the present year,' he declared. By now he had enough slips (about three and a half million) to be going on with, and he decided he would in future ask for more books to be read only when he needed to fill a gap, or when he was uncertain whether the quotations he already had truly did represent the full history of a particular word. He would also make uplists of those words for which he felt he needed citations earlier than those his volunteers had already found. He called these lists his desiderata—and such lists also still exist today, as the modern editors of the OED entreat today's volunteers to see if they can spy any uses of words at earlier dates than so far found.

  Meanwhile, the proof pages began to come back from the compositors' stones. Each page was set by hand. So complex was the typesetting that every sheet was reckoned to cost about £5 to make up. 14 Dozens of compositors were involved: one of them, James C. Gilbert—a slender man, balding with a regallooking and very tidy white beard—appears, remarkably, to have worked on the entire run of the Dictionary. He joined the Press as an apprentice in 1880, then, according to a brief appreciation of his almost unimaginably long tenure, he recalled how he `lifted his first take … in 1882, at an early stage of the letter A', and was still working 36 years later when the final words (which all began with W, not Z, as will be explained) were set in January 1928. `James Gilbert had worked for a greater length of time and had set more type for the Dictionary than any other compositor,' the brochure records.