A 19th-century photograph in The Dictionary People, by Sarah Ogilvie, shows the editorial team of the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) looking exactly as you might expect them to look. In the foreground, wearing a mortarboard and the long white beard of a wizard, stands James Murray, the editor. Surrounded by stacks of paper, his staff bend diligently over their work behind him. Only half of them are bearded (and none so abundantly as Murray), but they are all neatly suited and male.
There is one anomaly in this image of Victorian scholarship, though: the picture was taken not in a library, nor even an office, but in a shed. Specifically, a shed in the garden of a private home in Oxford. More specifically, Murray’s home, where also lived his wife and their 11 children.
Ogilvie, whose book sets out to tell as inclusive a history as possible of the dictionary, takes palpable pleasure in such idiosyncratic details that reveal the range of people busy with what was an enormous undertaking. The Oxford English Dictionary was not the first dictionary ever published, nor was it even the first dictionary of English, but it was the first that took a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, approach to the language, “trac[ing] the meaning of words across time and describ[ing] how people were actually using them.”
This required the daunting task of tracing examples of words’ usage from across literature. That the compilation of the first edition took only 70 years to complete was thanks to the labor of thousands of volunteers, who sent selections from their personal reading flooding into Murray’s shed. Ogilvie, a lexicographer who wrote her doctorate on the dictionary and worked on its third edition, calls them “the Dictionary People.”
The Oxford English Dictionary was the first to take a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, approach to the language, “trac[ing] the meaning of words across time and describ[ing] how people were actually using them.”
What emerges from her research is a story of the dictionary as a vast, democratic enterprise—or, as Ogilvie puts it, “the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century—a huge crowdsourcing project.” She finds vicars and lunatics, dutiful daughters and Arctic explorers, New Zealanders and Americans, poring over books and taking notes.
She has a knack for bringing many of them to life, such as Alexander John Ellis, one of the phoneticians on whom George Bernard Shaw modeled Henry Higgins in Pygmalion (later the musical My Fair Lady), settling down to work in a coat with 28 bulging pockets; or Jemima Brown, who diligently provided contributions with her sister in the Cotswolds while also caring for their elderly father, waiting day after day for a word of praise from Murray.
Few of the names will be familiar (though Thomas Hardy did write in asking for the inclusion of three West Country words for different types of pasture), but together they build a vibrant portrait of a Victorian society enthusiastic about self-improvement, measurement, discovery, and labeling.
A story of the dictionary as a vast, democratic enterprise—or, as Ogilvie puts it, “the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century—a huge crowdsourcing project.”
Certain “types” emerge for those suited to dictionary volunteering. Murray was surprised to find that the Dr. Minor writing to him from Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, for example, was not a member of its staff but a patient—though his surprise was perhaps unwarranted, given that three of his four top contributors spent time in mental hospitals. Unrelatedly, the pages are also littered with suffragists, vegetarians, and Esperantists.
Murray himself was something of an outsider—a Scottish Nonconformist who left school at 14, he was never fully accepted into the academic elite at Oxford. His best contributors were often people who were similarly excluded: autodidacts, women, the neurodiverse, or those writing from outside of Britain. Volunteering seems to have appealed to people with something to prove, or some desire to be of service, and few outlets for their intelligence and diligence.
Readers who delight in obscure or obsolete words will delight in The Dictionary People, which casually chronicles the inclusion of such terms as “basidium” (“cells of the fructification in some fungi”), “pikelet” (“a type of round teacake”), “heartspoon” (“the slight hollow overlying the lower end of the breastbone”), and “outfangthief” (“the right of a lord of a private jurisdiction to claim for trial a thief captured outside the jurisdiction, and to keep any forfeited chattels on conviction”). And, yes, there is a chapter on naughty words. At its heart, though, this is a book about people, about individual efforts and collective achievement.
It is packed with detail, so much so that, rather like the Oxford English Dictionary itself, it is probably something of a dip-in-dip-out book, rather than a cover-to-cover-in-a-single-sitting affair. Highly readable and enjoyably digressive, it is one to approach at leisure for enlightenment and entertainment.
Sarah Watling is a London-based writer and the author of Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters and, most recently, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War
