A Home for Words

Among linguists, in fact, English is notorious for this phenomenon of desynonymization, in which each word brought into the language means something more, often much more, particular than it did in its original. Thus, for example, studio and study both come from the Latin word studium (via Italian and French, respectively) and both mean “a place to do mental work.” In any sensible language, that would be the end of it. But English can’t stand for two words to mean the same thing, and so we distinguish the words into rooms for two different species of mental work. As a result of this desynonymizing process, there are no true synonyms in the English language–except, it is said, for furze and gorse. Such particularity drives nonnative speakers crazy. Indeed, the ordinary English speaker needs at least twice as many words in his active vocabulary as speakers of other European languages.

The diverse vocabulary of English resulting from its various colonizers was augmented during the Renaissance by scholars’ and artists’ determination to bring into the language as many new words from Latin and Greek as possible in order to achieve the “rebirth of learning.”

Curiously, English greatly expanded its vocabulary at the same time as the French were attempting to cast out all “foreign” words as a part of their rebirth of learning. Thus, the single word conscience in modern French serves where English demands three different words: consciousness, conscience, and conscientiousness–a three-to-one difference between the two languages, which is about what the average speaker in each would use.

English has continued to bring foreign words into the language as a matter of habit, helped by the British imperial conquests and the spread of American commerce. Meanwhile, as James Murray, editor of the first edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary,” remarked in his article on the “English Language” for the “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” words that were once technical words seem to pass naturally into common use: “Ache, diamond, stomach, comet, organ, tone, ball, carte are familiar, once-technical. Commercial, social, artistic or literary contact has also led to the adoption of numerous words from modern European languages. . . . Thus from French soirée, séance, dépôt, débris, programme, prestige; from Italian bust, canto, folio, cartoon, concert, regatta, ruffian; from Portuguese caste, palaver; from Dutch yacht, skipper, schooner, sloop.”

AND YET, despite these natural English tendencies, no one, not even its originators and editors, guessed that English contained hundreds of thousands of words–until the “Oxford English Dictionary” finally put out its first edition in 1928. All previous incarnations of the English dictionary–a new literary form started in the seventeenth century–depended largely upon the author’s command of words. Even Samuel Johnson’s great 1755 dictionary, a household staple in England for two centuries, was founded essentially on the words Johnson knew as an educated man (with a little help from his friends).

The “Oxford English Dictionary” proposed instead to register all the words in the language. And so the editors recruited volunteers to peruse books, pamphlets, periodicals, and technical writings from the earliest days of modern English. The material to be read was divided into three periods: 1250-1526, 1526-1674 (here Cruden’s “Concordance” to the King James Bible was invaluable), and 1674 to the present. Thus, it was thought, one could find lines illustrating every word in each of its senses, including the earliest sense of the word when it came into the language.

Readers would send in slips that cited and quoted the passage in which they had found an “interesting” word. Workers at Murray’s “scriptorium” sorted the slips alphabetically, and editors determined from the sentences in which the word appeared its first meaning and subsequent development. In other words, the “Oxford English Dictionary” was to be what its subtitle declared it to be: “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.” It was designed not to prescribe how a word should be used, but rather how a word is in fact now used and how it had been used at the beginnings of the modern language.

The project, besides taking more time and discovering more words than had been thought, had great difficulty finding good readers. Readers would refuse to follow directions and send in their quotations on the backs of old envelopes, train tickets, discarded letters, or torn-off tops of newspapers. They would scribble so that their handwriting could not be read, or spill tea over the slips they sent in, or be such terrible spellers that their quotations were suspect. Some of them got bored and stopped sending in slips, a few had nervous breakdowns, and many of them tried to impose their own notions of correct speech on the quotations. One of the best readers was a murderer writing from the insane asylum, and another was a very eccentric and bitter hermit.

An early editor, Frederick Furnivall, declared all his readers “worthless,” but he himself, says Winchester, “had quite entirely lost the will and concentration that was necessary to run the project, and had quite frankly lost track of all the scores of volunteers, the hundreds of thousands of slips, the pages of schedules and proofs and specimen pages and type designs, and other details of dictionary assembly.”

When James Murray, its final editor and the one who saw the project to fruition, started on the “Oxford English Dictionary,” two million slips were missing. When many of them were recovered, he declared of some slips that “it would have been far better for them to have been written in Chinese, since he could always obtain the services of a translator.” By the end, there were some six million “good” slips.

Seventy-six years passed from the beginning to the publication of its final volume (1852-1928), from a to zyxt (a dialect form of seen). Words beginning with s are most numerous and required two volumes. The second largest is c, which has about as many words as a and b together. Wherever possible, lines from the earliest author to use the word were quoted. Each word was divided into its separate meanings, and etymologies were given.

CRITICS OFTEN NOTE that the “Oxford English Dictionary” is too expensive to appeal to anyone but libraries, and the lines and authors cited often do not, in fact, represent the oldest use of a word. For those who don’t have Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and other languages which don’t use the Roman alphabet, it is extremely irritating that no transliteration of the foreign lettering is given. The “Oxford English Dictionary” has little interest in Indo-European roots and does not relate words to them, as do college dictionaries in the United States. Furthermore, a well-made dictionary will not only list the meanings of a word in chronological order, but give definitions that reveal the process by which one meaning changed into the next–as does, for example, “Webster’s New World Dictionary.” Ideally, a dictionary will also have frequent “synonymies” which distinguish words near each other in meaning, for example grandiose, ostentatious, pretentious, pompous, as does the “Random House Webster’s College Dictionary.” None of these would violate the principle of discussing words on the basis of “historical principles.”

Still, this is mere caviling. No subsequent dictionary, however well put together, is not indebted to the “Oxford English Dictionary.” Simon Winchester’s “The Meaning of Everything” is a lively book, and it is studded with curious facts, eccentric persons, and comical events–a popularization of what is known about the making of the “Oxford English Dictionary.” Winchester’s prose, however, is moribund, filled with mixed and dead metaphors and solecisms that his subject might have talked him out of. For example, he tells us that Murray “wrote in some kind of elegant copperplate” (was it elegant or not?); that when Murray died, his colleagues were left “to suffer the peace of their bereavement”; and that it was not difficult “to write in fulsome terms” (when he means laudatory).

But “The Meaning of Everything” is well worth reading nonetheless, for the making of the “Oxford English Dictionary” is one of the great episodes in human history.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.