Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Oxford English Dictionary

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

In 1844, the Philological Society of London began investigating the creation of a new English dictionary. This initial foray would lead to a dictionary that would be unlike any other dictionary ever created. It would not just give the definition and spelling of a word, but a complete history of each word and where it came from. It would be one of the most ambitious literary projects in history. Learn more about the Oxford English Dictionary on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1884, the Philological Society of London began investigating the creation of a new English dictionary. This initial foray would eventually lead to a dictionary that would be unlike any other dictionary ever created. It wouldn't just give the definition and spelling of a word, but a complete history of each word and where it came from. It would be one of the most ambitious literary projects in history. Learn more about the Oxford English Dictionary on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is the professor and the master. Madman by Simon Winchester. Professor James Murray was the distinguished editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon who had served in the Civil War, was one of the most prolific contributors to the dictionary, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home.

After numerous refusals from Minor to visit his home in Oxford, Murray set out to find him. It was then that Murray would learn the truth about Minor, that in addition to being a masterly wordsmith. He was also an insane murderer locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audible trial.com slash everything everywhere or by clicking on the link in the show notes. The London Philological Society is the oldest organization in Great Britain dedicated to the study of language. Formed in 1842, one of their first objectives was to create a list of the deficiencies of the English language. By 1884,

they had hatched the idea of creating a new dictionary that would solve the problems they saw in current dictionaries. The process, however, was incredibly slow. It took until 1857 to establish a committee to create a list of unregistered words. These were words that weren't in current dictionaries or were poorly defined. If this had been the extent of what the Philological Society had done, I wouldn't be doing an episode about this. The man who headed up the committee was Richard Chenovic's Trench. Trench wasn't interested in just coming up with a list of unregistered words. His ambition was much greater. The report he produced was something else entirely. His report was titled, On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries, it detailed all of the problems with current

English language dictionaries in the 19th century. He noted problems with the lack of coverage of obsolete words, histories of words, synonyms of words, and poor examples and illustrations of words. What Trench propose wasn't just a dictionary like the society had considered in the past. Trench was proposing writing the dictionary, the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language. It wouldn't just be a list of words, but of all of the words no longer in use and the history of all the words and where they came from. This would be a massive, massive undertaking. In 1858, the Philological Society formerly called for the creation of a new dictionary which they

called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. The first order of business was hiring someone to be the editor. Trench wasn't able to take on the assignment as he was appointed the dean of Westminster Abbey. The job fell to Herbert Coleridge. Coleridge was only 29 when he was appointed in 1960. He created the outline and strategy for the entire project. He began the system to categorize the hundreds of thousands of quotes which would be required. Unfortunately, in 1861, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 30.

The editor's job then fell to Frederick James Fernival, one of the founders of the Philological Society. Fernival was an excellent scholar, had great enthusiasm for the project, and was a horrible administrator. All of the quotation cards and the system which Coleridge had developed was put into total disarray. For example, all of the words beginning with the letters PA were lost for over 12 years before they finally showed up in Ireland. His underlings couldn't stand working for him. He has sub-editors for individual letters of the alphabet, and the sub-editors for A-I-J-N-O-P-N-W all quit on him. Eventually, he stepped down in 1878,

and he handed the mess off to one James Murray. The transfer was part of the deal for the dictionary to finally get a publisher. Twenty years after the project started, the Oxford University Press agreed to publish the massive project. Murray had previously applied for the job back in 1861. In the letter he originally sent to the board, he said he had intimate acquaintance with Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Latin, and to a lesser degree with Portuguese, Vodois, Provencial, and other dialects. In addition, he was tolerably familiar with Dutch, German, and Danish. His studies of Anglo-Saxon and Mesogothic had been much closer.

He knew a little bit of the Celtic and was at time gauged with the Slavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. He had sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament. and Pestown, and to a lesser degree, he knew Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic, and Phoenician. Unfortunately, his knowledge and skill didn't get him a job in 1861 because he didn't have a university degree. It was under James Murray that the dictionary really began to take shape. Murray, in addition to being a Scottish polymath who knew many languages and had a deep love of word etymology, was also very organized. From the very beginning, the project was so overwhelmingly large that they needed volunteers to do much of the research. In this respect, it was the original

Wikipedia. However, under Furnival, much of what was sent in was unorganized and wasn't well edited. This improved greatly under Murray. The original plan after Oxford University Press gained oversight of the project was to publish the complete work in 10 years. Despite two decades of work, the volume of information they had to plow through was so great that the deadline proved impossible. At its peak, over a thousand quotation slips from members of the number of of the public arrived daily, and by 1880 they had over 2.5 million of them, all of which had to be organized and categorized. The most significant contributor, both in terms of quality and quantity, was one Dr. William Minor. He would send in his contributions from the Broadmoor Asylum for the

criminally insane in Berkshire, England. It was assumed that he worked at the facility, given the high quality of the submissions he provided, and the fact that he was a doctor. James Murray eventually discovered that he was in fact a patient. He was an American Civil War veteran who came to London and in a paranoid fit killed a man. Despite his condition, Murray and Minor later became friends. Murray eventually published the first volume of the dictionary in 1884. It was 324 pages long and covered A through Ant. It was at this time that Murray hired his primary assistant Henry Bradley. In 1894, 10 years later, 11 volumes had been published. Four, covering the letters A and B, five covering the letter C and two for the letter E. Eight of the

eleven were 392 pages long. After these first 11 volumes, they began publishing shorter volumes more frequently. Eventually, Oxford University Press demanded that Murray moved to Oxford and that they hire more people to speed up the development of the dictionary. Murray remained the editor of the project until his death in 1915. The last volume of the dictionary was published on April 19, 19, 70 years after the project was conceived by Richard Trench. There were 125 individual installments released over 44 years. In 1933, a one-volume supplement was released, which covered new words and meetings,

with an emphasis on the oldest volumes which were released. All of the releases and the supplement were rebound into a huge 13-volume set in 1933, which was finally under the name the Oxford English Dictionary. The entire dictionary was and is, an expensive purchase. In 1971, they issued a two-volume edition of the book, where each page had nine pages of the previous edition in extremely tiny type. A magnifying glass was provided so you could actually read the text, and it became its best-selling version. The English language, however, doesn't stand still. They issued supplements in 1972, 1976, 1988, and 1986,

bringing the total to 17 volumes. After the 1982 supplement was released, the decision was made to create a second edition, 98 years after the first volume of the first edition was released. The biggest challenge with the second edition would be digitizing everything. In 1984, they launched the new Oxford English Dictionary Project. Over a period of five years, they had to input all 60 million words and 350 million characters,

which made up all of the definitions and definitions and supplements, as well as new additions and definitions. The project used 120 people doing data entry and 50 proof readers. The total cost was $13.5 million. Once it was digitized, however, it would never have to be done again. The second edition known as OED2 was released in 1989. It was 20 volumes and 20,730 pages long. A CD-ROM of the dictionary was released in 1992 and an online version 2000.

The second edition was mostly digitizing and condensing all of the supplements into the main dictionary, with some updates and additions. After the launch of the online version in 2000, work began on the third edition. This would be a complete revision and rewrite of the entire dictionary. As with the first edition, which released print updates from 1884 to 1928, the third edition is releasing periodic updates onto the online version. The third edition is expected to be complete in the year 2026. It will approximately double the size of the dictionary. There are currently 600,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, with new entries being added every year. The most recent round of editions included entries for assault weapon, chicken scratch, UFO, and weak sauce.

If you're a word lover or have one in your life and you want to buy them the ultimate gift, the complete 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary second edition will only run you about $1,500, brand new, or about $950 used on eBay. In the almost 150-year history of publishing the dictionary, the Oxford University Press has never made a profit. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. This is episode 200 of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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