Such are the concerns of those who superintend the cataloguing and describing of our language today—concerns that go beyond the plain demands of learning, that so entirely consumed the lives of all those editors, sub-editors, and assistants who went before.
The pictures of those who began the OED haunt us still: legions of elderly, usually bearded men, formally dressed in tweeds and gabardine, sitting at high desks, pens in hand, volumes open beside them, sheaves of paper in racks and shelves and pigeonholes behind them, a heavy, cloistered atmosphere of academic rigour and polymathic knowledge enveloping and embracing them like the very air itself. Today's images are very different: the men and women are younger, they come to work dressed as they please, they spend their times in brightly lit offices, computer screens are everywhere, telephones warble, modems blink, files are transmitted across oceans in microseconds, queries of all kinds are asked and answered in an instant. And yet the sepia pictures of the times before are still around, high on the walls, talked about, pointed at, revered. It is as if they offer to the editors of today some reassurance that the task upon which they are bent is not much different in its essence from how it was when Herbert Coleridge sat down in Regent's Park, all those years before.
So different now—and yet so very much the same. `The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre,' James Murray wrote in his famous Introduction, `but no discernible circumference.' Those who worked before in London and Mill Hill, in the Scriptorium on Banbury Road and in the Old Ashmolean and on Walton Crescent, indeed found and defined the well-defined centre of the English language. That is all now safely gathered in, and for this all must be eternally grateful. Those who work today, building on these undeniable triumphs of the past, are trying now to catch and snare the indiscernible, ever outwardspreading ripples of idiom and neologism and slang and linguistic invention by which the English language expands and changes, year by year, decade by decade, century by century.
We cannot tell what the editors will be like, will look like, how their working places will be designed or defined, in another 50 years, in another century, or in the next millennium. But the English language will be there for sure. Its centre will remain static and well defined. The circumferential ripples of new-formed English words will become ever larger, ever wider, and ever less well defined: that much is certain. And what is certain too is that humans, being humans, will be on hand as well, in some way or another, as they have been for so long, to catch all these words, to list them all, and to record and fix them all in time, for always.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Benzie, William, Dr. F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1983.
Berg, Donna Lee, A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Bridges, R. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Henry Bradley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928.
Brock, M. G., and Curthoys, M. C. (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vols. vi and vii: Nineteenth-Century Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Bryson, Bill, Mother Tongue: The English Language. London: Longman, 1990.
Burchfield, R. W., Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. 4 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972-86. Prefaces.
—— The English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Reissued 2002 with afterword by John Simpson.
—— Unlocking the English Language. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.
—— and Aarsleff, Hans, The Oxford English Dictionary and the State of the Language. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988.
Coleridge, Herbert, A Dictionary of the First, or Oldest Words in the English Language. London: John Camden Hotten, 1863.
Craigie, W. A., `New Dictionary Schemes Presented to the Philological Society, 4th April 1919', Transactions of the Philological Society 1925-1930 (1931), 8.
Crystal, David, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Furnivall, F. J., A Volume of Personal Record. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911.
Gowers, Sir Ernest, Plain Words. London: HM Stationery Office, 1951.
Green, Jonathon, Chasing the Sun. Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made. London: Cape, 1996.
Landau, Sidney I., Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
McAdam, E. L., and Milne, G., Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection. New York: Pantheon, 1963.
McArthur, T. (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
—— The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
McMorris, Jenny, The Warden of English: The Life of H. W. Fowler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
McCrum, R., Cran, W., and MacNeil, R., The Story of English. London: Faber & Faber, 1986.
Mathews, M. M., A Survey of English Dictionaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1933.
Middlemas, K., and Barnes, J., Baldwin: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
Moore, John, You English Words. London: Collins, 1961.
Mugglestone, Lynda (ed.), Lexicography and the OED. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Murray, K. M. Elisabeth, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977.
Murray, Wilfrid G. R., Murray the Dictionary-Maker. Cape Town: Rustica Press, 1943.
Raymond, Darrell R. (ed.), Dispatches from the Front: The Prefaces to the Oxford English Dictionary. Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo, 1987.
Shenker, Israel, Harmless Drudges: Wizards of Language—Ancient, Medieval and Modern. Bronxville: Barnhardt, 1979.
Simpson, John, and Weiner, Edmund, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Prefatory material in vol. i: `The History of the Oxford English Dictionary'.
Sutcliffe, Peter, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Trench, Richard Chenevix, A Select Glossary of Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from their Present. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1887.
Weiner, E. S. C., `The Federation of English', in C. Ricks and L. Michaels (eds.), The State of the Language. London: Faber & Faber, 1990.
Wells, John, Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library. London: Macmillan, 1991.
Willinsky, John, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Winchester, Simon, The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Also published as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. London: Viking, 1998.
The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford, 1933 and 1989. With Supplements.
The Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, 1917-
The Periodical
Notes and Queries
List of illustrations
Cawdrey's Dictionary (1604)
Johnson's Dictionary (1755)
Webster's Dictionary (1828)
Herbert Coleridge
Frederick Furnivall
The Scriptorium (Mill Hill)
Appeal to Readers
Slips
A proofed page from the first fascicle
James C. Gilbert
The first fascicle
Henry Bradley
`Sunnyside', 78 Banbury Road; Plaque and red pillar-box outside 78 Banbury Road
The Scriptorium (Banbury Road)
Inside the Old Ashmolean
Charles Onions
William Craigie
James Murray with daughters (c.1915)
Complete first ten-volume set of the OED
Four centuries of definitions
Robert Burchfield
John Simpson with some of the current lexicographers
Picture Acknowledgements
Pictures are reprinted with the permission of the Secr
etary to the Delegates of the Press.
Picture research by Sandra Assersohn.
Thanks also to Rupert Winchester, Martin Maw, OUP Archivist, and Peter Gilliver, Associate Editor for the OED.
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The Meaning of Everything Page 23
