You Could Look It Up (47 page)

Murray believed that a proper historical dictionary should tell the story of every word, and every story should start at the beginning. He took seriously Trench’s recommendation: “the
first
authority for a word’s use in the language which occurs should be adduced; … the moment of its entrance into it, … the register of its birth, should be thus noted.”
10
(Trench was thinking of both Passow’s principle and John Jamieson’s
Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language
, which in 1808 was the first to offer coverage of the birth of every word.) And so Murray
resolved to track down the first written occurrence of every word in the English language, along with at least one citation for every sense for each century, and, in the case of obsolete words, the last known citation.

How to recognize, in the Victorian era, the first occurrence of a word was a challenge. Trench was a keen reader, and he was among the first to state a principle that has guided lexicographers every since: “But if it be thus desirable to note in every case, so far as this is possible, the first appearance of a word, then all those tokens which will sometimes cleave to words for awhile, and indicate their recent birth, ought also to be diligently noted. None are more important in this aspect than what one may fitly call ‘marks of imperfect naturalization.’ ”
11
In other words, readers were asked to look for signs that a word was still novel to the audience. When someone read in one of Lord Chesterfield’s letters of 1768 that “I feel what the French call a general
mal-aise
, and what we call in Ireland an
unwellness
,” the phrase “what the French call” suggested that the English did not: it is the first known occurrence of
malaise
. Likewise, when a reader of W. Abney’s
Treatise of Photography
(1878) came across the sentence “The next lens … is what is known as a ‘wide angle’ doublet,” the telltale phrase “what is known as” suggested that the term was still unfamiliar to readers, and so it appeared as the first occurrence of
wide angle
.

All these pieces came together to form the dictionary. For 252,000 entries, covering 414,800 words and word forms, Murray and his team provided the headword, along with all its attested spellings and when they were current; pronunciation; an etymology; a series of numbered definitions; and under each definition, quotations to illustrate the word in use. (Whereas the Grimms gave leisurely passages from the great German writers, Murray trimmed his quotations carefully, leaving enough to get the sense of a sentence but no more.)
12
Altogether there are 1,861,200 quotations, covering 4,500 works by 2,700 authors.

The information in each entry includes a pronunciation, then a list of accepted spellings used over the centuries:

Forms: 3–4, 7
elemens
(
pl.
), 4
ela
-
,
elemente
, 5
elymente
, 6
elyment
,
elemente
, 4–
element
.

Space is at a premium, so single digits indicate centuries (“3–4,” for example, means “current in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries”). For some words, the list of spellings can go on for many lines. Then comes a discussion of the word’s origin. Curt, even single-word etymologies are usually adequate, but when necessary, Murray provided long and detailed descriptions of a word’s derivation:

[a. OF.
element
, ad. L.
elementum
, a word of which the etymology and primary meaning are uncertain, but which was employed as transl. of Gr.
στοιχειον
in the various senses:—a component unit of a series; a constituent part of a complex whole (hence the ‘four elements’); a member of the planetary system; a letter of the alphabet; a fundamental principle of a science.]

Definitions, sometimes running to dozens of numbered senses, are laid out in a hierarchical outline, with meanings grouped into families. Daggers indicate obsolete definitions:

    
I.
A component part of a complex whole.

    * of material things.

1.
One of the simple substances of which all material bodies are compounded.

    †
a.
In ancient and mediæval philosophy these were believed to be: Earth, water, air, and fire. See examples in 9.
Obs.
exc.
Hist.

    †
b.
In pre-scientific chemistry the supposed ‘elements’ were variously enumerated, the usual number being about five or six. (See quots.)…

    
c.
In modern chemistry applied to those substances (of which more than seventy are now known) which have hitherto resisted analysis, and which are provisionally supposed to be simple bodies… .

2.
In wider sense: One of the relatively simple substances of which a complex substance is composed; in
pl.
the ‘raw material’ of which a thing is made… .

3.
The bread and wine used in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Chiefly
pl.

Under each definition appears a series of quotations, in chronological order:

1813
SIR
H. D
AVY
Agric. Chem.
i. (1814) 8 Bodies . . not capable of being decompounded are considered . . as elements.
1830
M. D
ONOVAN
Dom. Econ.
I. 111 Sugar is composed of three elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
1841
E
MERSON
Ess. Hist.
Wks. (Bohn) I. 17 Fifty or sixty chemical elements.
1854
B
USHNAN
in
Circ. Sc.
(
c
1865) II. 6/1 The proximate elements are formed by the union of several ultimate elements.
1881
W
ILLIAMSON
in
Nature
No. 618. 414 The foundation of . . chemistry was laid by the discovery of chemical elements.

The
New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
—such was the original title—took far longer than the early planners expected. Murray died in 1915, having completed
Q
; his assistants carried on to the end of the alphabet. The tenth volume,
wise
–
zyxt
, appeared on April 19, 1928, and it was followed in 1933 by complete republication with the contents rejiggered into twelve volumes, with a thirteenth supplemental volume that brought some of the early material up to date and corrected some errors. The title was also changed in the reissue: now that Oxford University Press was firmly in charge, it was officially the
Oxford English Dictionary
.

A series of supplements appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, bringing the Victorian material up to date; in 1989, the supplements were merged with the main body of the dictionary into one long sequence to produce the second edition, or
OED2
. A third edition is now under way, but this time it will be a top-to-bottom rewrite: most of the work in
OED2
dates back to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Updates continue apace, made easier now that the whole is maintained online. As I write, the
OED
contains 2,674 words first used in the 1970s (
benchmarking
,
carjacking
,
factoid
,
mail bomb
,
retro
), 1,580 from the 1980s (
biodiversity
,
bitch-slap
,
gaydar
,
power-walk
,
studmuffin
), 632 from the 1990s (
bootylicious
,
cybercafe
,
dotcom
,
smackdown
,
spammer
), and 64 from the 2000s (
bromance
,
crowdsource
,
podcast
,
selfie
,
waterboarding
). As time passes, recent decades will be more fully represented.

The accomplishment of these historical dictionaries—begun in the era of the quill pen, completed in the era of the typewriter—is astonishing. The searches made possible by computers and huge textual corpora have revolutionized historical lexicography; we can now turn up the evidence required for a dictionary entry with little effort. But de Vries, Murray, and their successors did it all with only sharp eyes and patient attention. Any modern lexicographer who has closely examined the quality of this work, conceived and largely carried out in the nineteenth century, has to admire their achievement in making every word tell its own story.

CHAPTER
18 ½

OVERLONG AND OVERDUE

When Charles Dickens's young hero David Copperfield arrives at a new school he meets the elderly schoolmaster, Dr. Strong, a true scholar, “always engaged in looking out for Greek roots” for his classical dictionary. But while Strong had convinced himself “he had been advancing with it wonderfully,” his progress was not all it might be. One of David's classmates with “a turn for mathematics” looked at how long he had been working, how much he had completed, and how much he had yet to do, and delivered the estimate, “It might be done in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the Doctor's last, or sixty-second, birthday.”
1
Dr. Strong's progress is all too typical of actual reference books. Every major reference project ends up overlong, overdue, and over budget.

The editorial apology for missed deadlines is an essential part of every dictionary or encyclopedia preface. Thomas Blount apologized for his
Glossographia
(1656), which “has taken me up the vacancy of above Twenty years”;
2
Abraham Rees's
Cyclopædia
(1802–20) also trickled out over two decades, prompting him to write, even more embarrassed, “Some apology may, perhaps, be thought necessary for the extension of this work beyond the limits first proposed.”
3
But twenty years is nothing in the world of reference publishing. The Académie Française started its
Dictionnaire
in 1635 and spent fifty-nine years on it—during which time two rival dictionaries were begun and finished. The same story is written today.
DICTIONARY REACHES FINAL DEFINITION AFTER CENTURY
reads a BBC headline of August 31, 2014, reporting the completion of
The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources
, launched in 1913 and completed, with an entry for
zythum
, 101 years later.
4

Extra time almost always means extra space. The French
Encyclopédie
was planned for ten volumes, eight of text and two of illustrations. Had it appeared in that format, it still would have been longer than any of its competitors in France or England.
5
But it ended up 250 percent over its projected size, with seventeen volumes of text and eleven of illustrations. Charles Joseph Panckoucke declared confidently that his
Encyclopédie méthodique
, planned for twenty-one volumes, would be finished in five years, but, as one historian notes, “he was already wondering if his estimate of the number of volumes was entirely accurate.”
6
He was right to wonder. The encyclopedia began appearing in November 1782, but it was not completed until 1832, when it occupied more than two hundred volumes, exceeding his estimates of both time and length by a factor of ten.

Some projects chug along at a reasonable pace for a while, only to hit a snag. The
Videnskabernes Selskabs Ordbog
, the great Danish dictionary sponsored by the Academy of Sciences, began appearing in 1781, with the first full volume coming out in 1793. Volumes appeared every few years until 1853, when the dictionary had reached
U
. The final volume, though,
V
–
Z
, did not appear until 1905, fifty-two years after the prior volume. Altogether it took 112 years to get from volume 1 to volume 8.

The early plan for what became the
Oxford English Dictionary
called for a book about the size of Webster's
American Dictionary
, to be completed in ten years. Five years into the project, half the projected time for the whole dictionary, the lexicographers had reached the word
ant
, and they had not published a page. The publishers (Macmillan—Oxford University Press had not yet come on board) were concerned about the length. They thought 2,000 pages about right, and drew a firm line at 4,000. The Philological Society came back with a counteroffer of 5,000 pages, thinking it would probably end up closer to 6,000. Macmillan, eager to compromise, settled on 4,800 pages.
7
But both the page count and the calendar kept increasing. Ten years turned into seventy-five, and 2,000 pages into 15,487.