The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  John Johnson calculated the costs and, come April 1928, he advertised the price—once the Delegates and Publisher Milford had agreed upon it. The work, emblazoned with the names of the editors—Sir James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie, C. T. Onions—was now available, according to a special flyer, at the price of `50 guineas for 10 volumes bound as 12 [for as 10 two would have been too bulky] in half-morocco; 50 guineas for 20 half-volumes in quarter persian; and 55 guineas for 20 halfvolumes in half-morocco'. 9 Then follows the odd phrase `OF ALL BOOKSELLERS'—which suggests a prepositional error, though heaven forfend that John deMonins Johnson could ever perpetrate such a thing. 10 The phrase appears in much later flyers too, suggesting unusual style rather than careless mistake.

  Praise for the book was, in the months after first publication, well-nigh universal, perhaps taking itself to a point that, since this story is not supposed to be overtly hagiographical, becomes almost tedious to relate. To my mind two quotations sum up, deftly and rather more lightly than most, the delight in the admixture of excellence and the pride that dominated the weeks and months in the aftermath of the appearance of the completed work.

  The first, by now well known, came from the acerbic Baltimore wit and sometime lexicographer H. L. Mencken. He wrote in his newspaper column that `his spies had told him' that the appearance of the finished Dictionary would be celebrated in Oxford with `military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling contests between the different Colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts'.

  The second harks back to the man who started it all, Richard ChenevixTrench, who, it will be remembered, made his caustic speech of November 1857 attacking the deficiencies of the English dictionaries of the day. What had now been created, all its makers hoped, was a monument that would turn out to be quite wanting in deficiencies of any kind. To illustrate the point, Craigie—newly made Sir William Craigie at the Derby Day dinner, and given an Honorary LL D by Oxford the day before—quoted an obviously deficient but nonetheless memorable definition that he winkled out of Falconer's not widely known Dictionary of Marine.

  It was the definition of the simple word retreat. As Falconer has it: `Retreat is the order in which a French fleet retires before an enemy. As it is not properly a term of the British marine, any fuller account would be out of place.'

  Incorrect, and facetious. Very Johnsonian, one might say. Moderately witty of course, if in an unspeakably chauvinistic and these days politically incorrect way. But its existence, however shocking to the lexicographic purist, made a point. It was important for everyone to know, declaimed Professor Sir William Craigie, LL D, D.Litt, the fifth editor: no such definition—in fact nothing of the kind—would ever be allowed to occur, except inadvertently, within the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary.

  No sir! In this dictionary there would be no oats to feed those Scottish peasants. No definition would list unreadable complications involving decussated and reticulated networks. No guesses would be made of gymnastically unattainable positions for the mating of elephants. And there would be no sly cross-Channel sniping suggesting that only Frenchmen knew properly how to retreat. The work that he had made, the magisterial creation of all his distinguished forefathers that he was now so proud to offer, was, as near as could be made, the perfect dictionary, and so it would ever remain.

  [5] The Delegates studied the figures very closely, a legacy of Gell's era. In October 1903 they noted with a mixture of approval and asperity that Murray had composed 18 2/3 pages, Bradley 7 2/3 and Craigie 8 2/3. One reason for Bradley's apparent tardiness was his extraordinary prolixity: while not wishing to revisit the Webster ratio crisis, it is noteworthy that while Craigie was keeping his well down, to 4.7: 1, Bradley was preparing material that was more than 18 times as large as Webster. Murray had not managed to keep below his promised 8. In October 1903 his number was 10.7:1. Back

  [10] There are, however, oddities in the Dictionary itself, which look like errors. James Murray favoured such spelling as ax, Shakspere, tire (of motor cars), and rime— eccentricities abound, both in the book and in its advertisements. But in the book the alternative spellings are included as well, which is not true of the ad. There are discovered errors, too: the word syllabus, for example, is a ghost-word, coming from a mistransliteration by Cicero, who wrote the word instead of what he wanted, sittybas (which means a label), by mistake. The word syllabus should by rights not be in the English language at all.Back

  Epilogue:

  And Always Beginning Again

  A work of such magnificent proportions may perhaps not find access to many private houses except those of the rich; but it should be the most coveted possession of all public libraries in the United Kingdom, in the Colonies, and at least at the headquarters of every District in India and at her principal Colleges.

  (Asiatic Quarterly Review, 1898)

  But of course, it wasn't really finished. It never could be, it never would be, and it never will be. One of the infuriating marvels of the slippery fluidity of the English language is that for all of its 1,500 years of history it has been changing, enlarging, evolving: it would continue to do so long after the 1928 publication date, even as Herbert Coleridge had anticipated it would, when he undertook the beginnings of the task back in 1860.

  What was essentially finished, though, was the new Dictionary's structure. In creating it, James Murray had made something that was so good in all its essentials that, no matter how many editions and evolutions the OED would subsequently undergo, Murray's basic plan remained intact. Sir William Craigie, when he came to be Senior Editor on the death of Henry Bradley, remarked, generously, that Murray's form and methods and design `proved to be adequate to the end, standing the test of fifty years without requiring any essential modification'.

  The Murray methods would still be firmly entrenched when the first Supplement emerged, five years later, in 1933. There was no doubt but that a Supplement would be made. Those who had bought the complete edition in 1928 were told of it, and advised it would be supplied to them gratis, so long as they had already paid in full. Someone in the Press—possibly it was Craigie, though that is doubtful, since the editors themselves tended to adopt in public a rather modest pose—made a suitably Grandisonian announcement:

  The superiority of the Dictionary to all other English Dictionaries, in accuracy and completeness, is everywhere admitted. The Oxford Dictionary is the supreme authority, and without a rival. I t is perhaps less generally appreciated that what makes the Dictionary unique is its historical method; it is a Dictionary not of our English, but of all English; the English of Chaucer, of the Bible, of Shakespeare is unfolded in it with the same wealth of illustration as is devoted to the most modern authors. When considered in this light, the fact that the first part of the Dictionary was published in 1884 is seen to be relatively unimportant; 44 years is a small period in the life of a language. I t is, however, obviously desirable that aeroplane and appendicitis should receive due recognition. A supplement is accordingly in preparation, the main object of which will be to include words which were born too late for inclusion. Copies of the Supplement will be offered free to all holders of the complete Dictionary. 1

  Four centuries of definitions

  Robert Cawdrey: Table Alphabeticall (1604)

  Samuel Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

  Noah Webster: American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

  Oxford English Dictionary (1928)

  OEB third edition, draft entry (December 2001)

  And so in due course all these modern words were included, and the histories of both these and scores of words which deserved more amplification or explication—or which had evolved new meaning in the years between—were duly inscribed. Most related to technologies that had not even been imagined when Coleridge and Furnivall sat down to work, as Craigie wrote—words connected to biochemistry, wireless telegraphy and telephony,
mechanical transport, aerial locomotion, psycho-analysis, the cinema. In the end, 867 pages accommodated them all. The inclusions began with the use of the letter A to denote the highest attainable mark given in American schools (the phrase straight A is there as well: 1897 for the first use of A, 1926 for straight A). And they ended with the word zooming, defined as `making or accompanied by a humming or buzzing sound', and first noted in a July edition of Blackwood's Magazine in 1923.

  The word pacifist is in the Supplement too. Some critics had earlier written of their disappointment in discovering that `though of decent parentage and respectable antiquity' it was a word that for some mysterious and perhaps politically sinister reason `found no place in the OED'. But the truth was far simpler: the word had simply not been quoted in any published material until the year 1906—even though pacify had been around since the fifteenth century and pacific since the sixteenth. The notion that Murray had overlooked it because quotations that included pacifist were destroyed with the other Pa slips in the southern Irish barn does not stand up: lexicographers have scoured the literature ever since, and it is an Edwardian neologism, pure and simple.

  African was in the Supplement, now that Murray had taken his hostility to the word with him to the grave. The forlornly misplaced bondmaid was there, its slips having been found lurking under a pile of books in the Scriptorium long after the B volume had gone to press. Television was there (in the 1928 edition it was too, but with the caveat `not yet perfected'). Radio was fleshed out (earlier there had been merely a passing reference, taken from TitBits, to a Mr Marconi and `his radio or coherer', which transmitted wireless telegraphy). And radium was properly included too—`a rare metallic element … Curie … 1898 … atomic number 88'. Nary a mention of tobacco tins or squint-eyed rats; nothing untoward had crept into the definition.

  The only notable omission is not a word, but a listing in the Preface: for the first time since 1884 there is no mention anywhere of either Miss Edith or Miss E. P. Thompson, of Liverpool, Reigate, and Bath. The Dictionary had outlived them, as it would eventually outlive all who helped to make it. And as it always will.

  And so there, with its thirteen majestic, gold-blocked dark blue cloth and clotted-cream-coloured paper-covered volumes, the Oxford English Dictionary duly stood guard over the tongue for the next 40 years. It had taken 76 years and had cost £375,000 to get to this point—though nobody at Oxford had a real idea of what the monetary figures really meant: overheads had never been included, and the value of money had changed beyond all reason. The Dictionary was no money-spinner, that was for sure—the coincidence of the Supplement's publication with the Great Depression limited still further any sales which might optimistically have been predicted.

  The new Delegates' wonderfully old-fashioned Secretary, R. W. Chapman—a man who never rode in a car nor ever used a typewriter or a fountain pen—ordered up 10,000 sets of the complete Dictionary in 1935. It was supposed they would endure for all time, and there would never be the need to print again. At the outbreak of the war in 1939 there were 6,000 of them left, and it was thought that if the worst came to the worst they could be used as some kind of air raid shelter, at least as efficacious as sandbags and, for Oxford people, rather more suitable.

  Once the debris of war had been cleared away and the dreaming leisure of peace began to settle back onto Oxford, the single admitted deficiency of the OED, one common to any dictionary of English—the fact that it was always bound to be out of date— was addressed once more. A further clutch of supplements were planned, this time under the editorship of a genially energetic New Zealander, Robert Burchfield, who took a suite of nondescript offices in a house near to the Press, in Walton Crescent, and eventually installed eighteen staff members there. One formal picture of the team, taken in the same style and the same place (the main quadrangle of the Press) as all the formal pictures of Murray's and Bradley's and Craigie's teams before—shows, in the front row, one `Mr. J. P. Barnes'. Rarely does an OED man become a celebrity beyond his own rather crabbed field of endeavour: but, as Julian Barnes, this particular young editorial assistant was soon to emerge from the harmless drudgery of lexicography to become one of Britain's most celebrated essayists and novelists.

  Burchfield's four-volume Supplement, assembled from the vast hoard of words that scattered members of the Dictionary team had been gathering all the while 2 —and which tried to make sense of the vocabulary havoc that was being played by some authors, James Joyce most notable among them—came out at four-year intervals, the first in 1972, the last, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II, in 1986. Charles Onions 3 was still alive, and helped Burchfield until the mid-1960s. In the end, 50,000 words were added— including (as Burchfield wrote in his final Preface to Volume IV) several which their creators helped to define: Anthony Powell, for example, helped with acceptance world, A. J. Ayer with drogulus, Buckminster Fuller with Dymaxion, J. R. R. Tolkien—a former assistant and walrus expert—with hobbit, and the cosmologist Murray Gell-Mann with quark. Psychedelic, coined in 1957, but popular at the time that Volume III was being printed, made it, just in time.

  Robert Burchfield, the New Zealand-born lexicographer who created the four-volume supplement to the completed OED, which appeared between 1972 and 1986. He added a further 50,000 words to the amassment of the tongue.

  The books that resulted, superficially identical in design and layout to their predecessors, were composed on machines, printed lithographically and bound, not by hand as before, but on a wondrous contraption known as a No. 3 Smyth-Horne Casing-In Machine. Whole quires were sent to Tokyo and New York to be similarly assembled there. And at the same time as Oxford's printing passed from letterpress to lithography, so all the steel-andantimony printing plates that served the OED for decades past were dumped, eventually to be tossed away. A few survive: I still have, mounted in a frame, the plate for page 452 of Volume V, which encompasses the words Humoral to Humour. It was made in 1933. I would like to think that it might have been made in perhaps June 1899 and used to print sheets for the following 70 years.

  In 1971, just before the publication of the first of the Supplement volumes, and to help OUP make money out of this enormous enterprise and inject some cash into Burchfield's endeavours, the entire first edition was `micrographically reproduced', its print made near-invisibly tiny so that all thirteen volumes could be compressed into two. The entire OED was thus able to be sold in one big blue box, along with a handsome magnifying glass in a nifty little drawer at the top—and it sold like hot cakes, particularly in America, where book clubs bought it at massive discounts and used it as a free gift to induce readers to join.

  One major task lay ahead, however. In 1986 the language as corralled by Oxford was now arranged into not one but three parallel alphabetical lists: the main OED, the 1933 Supplement, and the four-volume Burchfield Supplement. Anyone looking for a word had of necessity to look in three different places. The OED was, in short, a mess. To make some sort of sense, all of the words, no matter how young or how old they might be, had now to be alphabetically integrated with one another, and one complete list had to be created in place of the existing three. The only way to do this—and to ensure that later expansions could take place with ease and without the need to unpick and rewrite all over again— was to take all of the original material and to recast it, from A to Zyxt, by using what in those days was a giant computer.

  And so in the mid-1980s, with an enormously generous donation from IBM of computers and staff, with the work of a number of specialists at Canada's University of Waterloo in Ontario, by employing the keyboarding labours of hundreds of men and women who, in a vast warehouse in Florida, had hitherto been accustomed to the assembling of telephone directories, 4 and under the editorial supervision of two brand new co-editors, John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, the entire OED was ripped asunder, retyped, turned into binary code, and then reprinted. It came out on time in 1989 as an immense twenty-volume second edition, which defined a total of 615,100 wor
ds, and illustrated those definitions with 2,436,600 quotations. To do so took 59,000,000 words and 21,730 pages, and consumed almost 140 pounds of paper, for every single set of books.

  John Simpson, the current editor of the OED, with some of his staff and their electronic versions of Murray's pigeon-hole filing systems. The third edition of the Dictionary, on which Simpson and his colleagues have been working since the 1990s, is due out some time in the early 21st century.

  And though that final number might seem merely a facetiously introduced piece of trivia, it does in fact concern John Simpson, who currently edits (with Edmund Weiner as his Deputy Chief Editor) what is being called the Revised Edition. For this will truly be a monster—an OED so massive as perhaps only to be amenable to use on-line. Just as in Murray's time, no-one is precisely certain when it will be finished. It may include a million defined words. It could run to as many as forty volumes. It could weigh in at nearly a sixth of a ton, for each and every set. Each printing would consume a sizeable acreage of woodland. The environment would be affected, significantly. Would it be worthwhile? Would everyone like the comfort of knowing there was a beautiful 40-volume book out there? Or would all the world prefer the wisdom of the Dictionary to be purveyed electronically, with no physical harm to anyone or anything at all, and only the intellectual benefits deriving from all those decades of scholarship?