The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  The first fascicle, containing the 8,365 words which James Murray and his colleagues declared was the entire sum of the English words between A and Ant, was published in January 1884—27 years after Dean Trench's speech.

  Murray's seemingly dilatory state was as nothing when compared to the molasses-in-January progress in the scriptoria over on the European mainland. And he eventually realized it when, some years later, he was able to write approvingly of the speed with which his own dictionary-making machine was functioning. `We have already overtaken Grimm, and have left it behind.' But that was in the future: just now, matters seemed to grind exceeding slow. These first 8,365 words had been won with the expenditure of Stakhanovite degrees of labour.

  Before describing just what was in—and what was not in— Murray's first fascicle, a small but significant fact needs to be pointed out: something that will make rather more sense when we come to the very end, or least to the most modern part, of this story. A detailed textual analysis throws up in these very early parts of the Dictionary certain slight idiosyncrasies of style, a certain lack of consistency, a vague impression of (dare one say it?) raggedness that, while invisible to all but the most critical readers, suggests a degree of editorial hesitancy, an unease, a lack of complete confidence, a quite understandable sense of the editor perhaps not yet being fully into his stride. With the publication of each successive part, and, when in later years, whole volumes of the Dictionary appeared, so Murray's confidence and that of his colleague editors became, as one might anticipate, ever greater; the curious details and faint clues that occasionally give slight pause to those lexicographers who study the work's early parts vanished clear away. The early letters of the alphabet might fairly be said to be the dictionary equivalent of a `Friday car'—fashioned not quite as perfectly as were some of the later letters, in much the same way that a car made moments before everyone leaves for the weekend might not be quite as fine as that produced when the assembly line was working at its best.

  All of which serves to explain why the editors of the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, working to Murray's template, decided at the end of the twentieth century to begin their work with the letter M, not A. That way two things would happen: their own unadmitted inconsistencies at the start of their labours would be balanced by the perfection of Murray's middle-alphabet work; and by the time they reached a point of what they considered `stability'—most probably the end of the letter R—and then turned to Murray's perhaps ever so slightly ragged A, their own system would be so firmly in place as to negate any shortcomings from the nineteenth century.

  What we are talking about here is slight and subtle, idiosyncrasies that would pass unnoticed by almost all readers. But the reputation of the Dictionary centres about its majestic degree of accuracy and perfection: it was to obviate any possibility of a shortfall in standards that the new editors decided to begin their effort in the middle, and not at the beginning.

  There were more than a thousand columns of type set out in Part I, and a total of 8,365 words. Murray separated these into three types. There were 6,797 instances of what he liked to call `Main Words', each of which in his considered judgement deserved a separate article—words like advance, to pluck one at random from the fascicle, which has an `article' that illustrates sixteen meanings for the verb form and ten for the noun, and which takes up very nearly a full page of the Dictionary. Then there were a further 570 `Combinations'—doubled-up words (to follow the chosen article to its end) like advance-guard, advance-party, and, peculiarly close to home in the case of James Murray, advance-proofs. And then another 998 entries, in those early days identified by being printed in smaller and fainter type, were deemed to be `Subordinate' words, which were cross-referenced to the Main Words—subordinates like advant, which is an obsolete version of the verb to advance, subordinate to and therefore cross-referenced to advance, and which was first used by the poet and translator George Chapman 3 in 1605.

  Almost a third of the 6,797 Main Words—1,998 of them, to be exact—were now obsolete themselves. They were all well worthy of inclusion in the Dictionary, however, for heaven forfend that anyone might ever stumble across a printed word in a book no matter how old or obscure and not find it in the Dictionary—it must be remembered that it was the intended function of a work like this to capture the language in its entirety, remembering all the while that one man's dead word may yet be another's still alive.

  A further 321 of the words found lying between A and Ant Murray deemed `foreign or imperfectly naturalized'. By that he meant they were not entirely English, in other words—rather more tied still to their origins in French, Italian or `East Indian', but more or less current in contemporary usage.

  The first part's first word—once the four pages devoted to the simple letter A had been accounted for, and after the entry for an occasionally used means of spelling the long a, aa—was the obsolete word for a stream or a watercourse, the noun spelled in the same way, aa. There was just one quotation supporting its use, taken from `The Muniments (the deeds or official documents) of Magdalen College, Oxford', referring in 1430, and in a Norman-French-Latin hybrid tongue, to a widely used communal waste channel in the Lincolnshire marsh-town of Saltfleetby, as `le Seventowne aa'.

  The first properly current word in the fascicle was aal, the Bengali or Hindi word for a plant similar to madder, from which a dye could be extracted for colouring clothes. One of Murray's readers had found the word in Andrew Ure's Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines, published in 1839, in a sentence that provided a nice example of a classic illustrative quotation: `He has obtained from the aal root a pale yellow substance which he has called morindin.' 4

  Then, notwithstanding the objections of Benjamin Jowett's anonymous Delegate friend, the words aardvark and aardwolf are both included, with three quotations for the former and two for the latter: Murray had evidently seen off with quiet dispatch the lunacy of the idea of omitting such words. Aardvark is particularly lovingly chronicled, as the first familiar and properly English word in the book should perhaps be: it comes from the Dutch word aarde, meaning earth, combined with a series of Old English and Old High German forms of the Latin word porcus, a pig:

  Murray's definition, suitably scholarly and concise, reads:

  A South-African quadruped (Orycteropus capensis Cuv.) about the size of a badger, belonging to the insectivorous division of the Edentata, where it occupies an intermediate position between the Armadillos and Ant-eaters.

  By chance, the fact of Murray writing this summary of the famous Cape Colonial earth-pig points up one of the short-lived eccentricities of the early days of the Dictionary, a personal foible of Murray's own which was to land him in no small amount of hot water. Although by coincidence and chance he writes in the definition the hyphenated phrase South-African, he does not in fact permit the word African to appear, as a headword, as a listed adjective, in his Dictionary. He tries to explain why in his Preface, and one can feel him squirming uncomfortably as he does so:

  …the word African was one of the earliest instances in which the question of admission or exclusion arose with regard to an important adjective derived from a geographical proper name. After much careful consideration, and consultation with advisers, it was decided (perhaps by a too rigid application of first principles) to omit the word, as having really no more claims to inclusion than Algerian, Austrian or Bulgarian. But, when American was reached, some months afterwards, it was seen that Americanize and Americanism must of necessity be included, and that these (`with the Americanising of our institutions') could not be explained without treating American, and explaining its restricted application to the United States. American was accordingly admitted. Then the question arose, whether the exclusion of African was consistent with the inclusion of American; but the question came too late; African had been actually omitted, on its own merits.

  Murray realized his misjudgement swiftly. He eventually over-ruled himself, and decided that Afr
ican was after all to be included in the first Supplement, which would be published some five years after all the work on the Dictionary had been done in 1933. But its absence from Part I, and then again from the First Edition's Volume Iwhich was published in 1888 and which includes all of the 31,254 words that begin with A and B, is very noticeable. (It should by rights have been located between an obsolete word for `devour', afrete, and the word for `face-to-face', afront. There is otherwise no word listed that begins with the letters Afri-, and most decidedly not that which describes what once was known, from H. M. Stanley's popular book, as `the Dark Continent'. 5 ) It can be seen today as an error—or a wrong-headed judgement-call— which stands as mute testimony to the complexities of the decision-making which so stimulated, and yet so wearied, James Murray, as he steadily and manfully wound his way through the untrodden forests of the language. 6

  Murray himself—a man never averse to revealing to all the trials of his task—offers in the Preface a snapshot of the difficulties involved in being so much of a pioneer:

  Our attempts lay no claim to perfection; but they represent the most that could be done in the time and with the data at our command. The … direction in which much time has been consumed is the elucidation of the meaning of obscure terms, sometimes obsolete, sometimes current, belonging to matter of history, customs, fashions, trade or manufactures. In many cases, the only thing known about these was contained in the quotations, often merely allusive, which had been collected by the diligence of our readers. They were to be found in no dictionary, or, if mentioned in some, were explained in a way which our quotations evidently showed to be erroneous. The difficulty of obtaining first-hand and authoritative information about these has often been immense, and sometimes insurmountable. Ten, twenty or thirty letters have sometimes been written to persons who, it was thought, might possibly know, or succeed in finding out, something definite on the subject; and often weeks have passed, and `copy' advances into the state of `proof', and `proof' into `revise', and `revise' even into `final', before any results could be obtained. It is incredible what labour has had to be expended, sometimes, to find out facts for an article which occupies not five or six lines; or even to be able to write the words `Derivation unknown', as the net outcome of hours of research and of testing the statements put forth without hesitation in other works.

  Elisabeth Murray, in her classic biography of her grandfather, recalls a lecture in which he listed a typical daily bout of letterwriting:

  I write to the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew about the first record of the name of an exotic plant; to a quay-side merchant at Newcastle about the Keels on the Tyne; to a Jesuit father on a point of Roman Catholic Divinity; to the Secretary of the Astronomical Society about the primum-mobile or the solar constant; to the Editor of The Times about a letter of the year 1620 containing the first mention of Punch [the beverage]; to a Wesleyan minister about the itineracy; to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it, 7 to the Sporting News about a term in horse-racing, or pugilism; or the invention of the word hooligan in June 1898; to the Librarian of the Cambridge University Library for the reading of the first edition of a rare book; to the Deputy Keeper of the Rolls for the exact reading of a historical MSwhich we have reason to suspect has been inaccurately quoted by Mr. Froude; to a cotton manufacturer for a definition of Jaconet, or a technical term of cotton printing; to George Meredith to ask what is the meaning of a line of one of his poems; to Thomas Hardy to ask what is the meaning of a word terminatory in one of his novels; to the Editor of the New York Nation for the history of an American political term; to the administrator of the Andaman Islands for an exact reference to an early quotation which he has sent for the word Jute, or the history of Talapoin; to the Mayor of Yarmouth about the word bloater in the herring fishery; to the Chief Rabbi for the latest views upon the Hebrew Jubilee; to a celebrated collector of popular songs for the authorship of `We don't want to fight, But by Jingo if we do,' which gave his name to the political Jingo.

  It is worth remembering that all of this correspondence had to be written by hand; and that the letters had, what is more, to be written twice. Although carbon paper had been invented by an Italian in 1806, its use for the making of copies of handwritten letters had not been perfected, and most courteous correspondents—like Murray, who was notably so, and who wrote in some kind of elegant copperplate—preferred the tribulations of simply writing everything out once again, of making a fair copy.

  Many of the letters he wrote were to celebrated figures—Lord Tennyson preeminent among them. Once he had to write to Robert Browning, asking the meaning of the word apparitional. Browning's reply confused him, and in later years Murray was mildly scathing about the poet's constant use of words `without regard to their proper meaning'—a habit, Murray complained, that `added greatly to the difficulties of the Dictionary'.

  Yet for all these vexing aspects of his work, the triumph of the first part of the Dictionary was plain to see. It was abundantly clear, even from this one small part, that what would eventually be published was the catalogue of a truly vast emporium of words. Here were the wonderful and the ordinary, cheek by jowl—acatalectic and adhesion, agnate and allumine, animal, answer, and ant. And by ant Murray did not only define the `social insect of the Hymenopterous order'—he included the prefix ant- as a contraction of anti-, and used in words like antacid, and the suffix -ant, attached to form words like tenant, valiant, claimant, and pleasant.

  True, there were critics aplenty, and as soon as the work was published letters started trickling in to the Scriptorium, triumphantly listing earlier quotations than those used, or alleging (usually erroneously) that words had been missed out. Murray, a prickly man at the best of times, was extremely sensitive to any criticism. But his confidence in his work was clearly burgeoning—and it allowed him (or so a few fans of Murray like to think) the luxury of inserting within the scores of pages and definitions and quotations in that first fascicle one of the very few witticisms that is known to exist in the complete work.

  When pressed, lexicographers involved in the making of the book remark that such humour as is to be found in the OED was placed there `only inadvertently', and so there almost probably was never any humorous intention on Murray's part—none, for instance, as there plainly was in the writing of the single-volume Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary of 1901, which had droll entries such as that for éclair: `a cake, long in shape but short in duration'.

  Nonetheless, in this first fascicle of the Philological Society's work we find what some might regard as a classically Oxford sense of amusement when we encounter the following, buried in the second sense of the very rare noun abbreviator:

  An officer of the court of Rome, appointed … to draw up the Pope's briefs …

  Would James Murray have inserted that definition, heavily freighted with its double entendre, deliberately, and out of a sense of fun? Probably not: briefs meaning underwear did not come into use until 1933—in all likelihood its inclusion truly was inadvertent, reflecting only the splendid innocence of the utterly aloof. And yet Ilike to wonder. There are more than a few photographs of Murray wearing a decidedly impish grin behind his beard, and Ilike to imagine that, from time to time, this increasingly confident man allowed himself the pleasure of teasing his otherwise rather stern and exacting readership, just a little.

  Many eminent figures read that first part of the great Dictionary. Some were admiring. A few of them carped. The Delegates—to Murray's chagrin, hurt, and disappointment—said nothing, offered no note of congratulation or encouragement. But there was one outsider who did read it, and who, moreover, did so with the greatest dispatch and eagerness. He was someone quite unknown to Murray: an outsider, an apparently unqualified critic with no track record in any of the lexical skills. He was, in fact, no more than a former corresponding clerk in a Sheffield cutlery firm, recently made redundant, a 39-year-old Nottinghamshire farmer's son named Hen
ry Bradley. His reading of it changed everything.

  On close scrutiny it would seem that Bradley's life and career to this point was in many respects rather like Murray's (except that Bradley had had far better than a rural Scottish village education—he had been at a grammar school in Chesterfield, a very traditional and well-regarded academy sited in the shadow of the curiously twisted spire of the town's Church of St Mary and All Saints 8 ). At the time of the publication of the Dictionary's first fascicle he was living in London and working as a freelance writer. He had been forced by impoverishment to take his previous job, and it was one that he didn't like (Bradley had counted shipments of spoons and knives that had been sent off to foreign clients, Murray had, prior to his schoolmastering days, written ledger entries for the foreign department of a bank). He had a sickly wife who needed to be moved to the warmer airs of the south (hence London, once the cutlers had sacked him). And, most importantly, he had an extraordinary and Murray-like aptitude for language.