Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary [Hardcover]

Dr. Lynda Mugglestone (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300106998 | ISBN-13: 978-0300106992 | Publication Date: May 10, 2005 | Edition: annotated edition

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) holds a cherished position in English literary culture. The story behind the creation of what is indisputably the greatest dictionary in the language has become a popular fascination. This book looks at the history of the great first edition of 1928, and at the men (and occasionally women) who distilled words and usages from centuries of English writing and “through an act of intellectual alchemy captured the spirit of a civilization.”
The task of the dictionary was to bear full and impartial witness to the language it recorded. But behind the immaculate typography of the finished text, the proofs tell a very different story. This vast archive, unexamined until now, reveals the arguments and controversies over meanings, definitions, and pronunciation, and which words and senses were acceptable—and which were not.
Lost for Words examines the hidden history by which the great dictionary came into being, tracing—through letters and archives—the personal battles involved in charting a constantly changing language. Then as now, lexicographers reveal themselves vulnerable to the prejudices of their own linguistic preferences and to the influence of contemporary social history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

How much blood, sweat and tears, not to mention time-49 years instead of the contracted 10-were invested in creating the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary! By revealing the storied history behind the formidable text, Mugglestone (Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent of Social Symbol) brings to life the histories of our lexicon and of the key players who painstakingly saw it into type. Central to the narrative are the numerous conflicts between the dictionary's editors and the delegates of the 19th-century Oxford University Press. The subjects of these clashes ranged from finance to time (in the first seven years, the editors didn't get past the letter "b") to concerns about space. The editors and delegates also struggled with issues of omission and correctness. For example, whereas the delegates protested the inclusion of "bad English" (i.e., slang, popular phrases and scientific jargon), editor-in-chief James Murray held fast to his vision of an "ideal dictionary" that would serve as an impartial, comprehensive inventory of the English language. This aspiration would prove elusive. Prudish Victorian norms prevailed over "vulgar" terminology, and words like "condom" were excised from the first edition, which was appropriately titled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principals. These battles are what make this book such a fascinating history, not only of how the OED came to be but of the cultural, racial and gender biases of the period. Though Mugglestone's tone can be overly academic, bibliophiles who loved The Professor and the Madman will relish this account.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has engendered several other chronicles, including Simon Winchester's Professor and the Madman (1998) and The Meaning of Everything (2003). Mugglestone, an Oxford English professor, bases her account on close examination of the page proofs for the first edition. Despite the aim to be neutral, inclusive, and exhaustive, the process of compiling the dictionary involved persistent winnowing, dictated partly by economic pressures and partly by questions from the publishers about modern sources (especially newspapers), scientific and technical terms, Americanisms, and more--and the cutting became more stringent as the dictionary progressed. Mugglestone also shows how the editors' own biases crept in with regard not only to proper usage but also to gender, race, and class. The result was a dictionary that, though great, did not always live up to its own ideals. This scholarly volume may not have the popular appeal of other books on the OED, but serious word lovers will appreciate its fascinating revelations. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; annotated edition edition (May 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300106998
• ISBN-13: 978-0300106992
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,487,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The possibilities were endless yet......, December 28, 2005

By 

Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Hardcover)

I was excited at finding such a book. As a reader, dictionary buff and word-lover, I thought it would be next to impossible to mess up the tale of the creation of the OED - Oxford English Dictionary. Unfortunately I was wrong.

The writing was - how to say this nicely - turgid, repetitive, boring, and poorly organized. I expected something...vastly different in both tone and content. It had the texture of molasses and moved at the speed of a snail. Following a roughly chronological pathway, we learn in excruciating detail that the goals and results of the committee created for such an enormous undertaking were not in sync. We learn (repeatedly) of words that were omitted, lost, edited out; we read that the culture of the time went a long way in the determination of the content and the examples.

Even with such an inferior presentation, one finds joy in the telling of the undertaking. Just the idea of presenting not only a definition but ALL definitions with examples, quotes, keys for pronunciation and, most importantly, an evolutionary history of the word, is mind-boggling. For some reason, the author came alive when the topic turned scientific as she portrayed the First Fathers as both pioneers and heroes, standing up for their country, their language and their belief in the future progress of mankind.

The ending seems hurried, forced, as we run through the final letters, the updates, the computer age. Perhaps the saddest conclusion concerning this book is that this could have been an exciting, edge-of-the-seat thriller. Instead, the author seemed almost determined to bore the reader to tears.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The History of the OED from Its Proofs, October 1, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Hardcover)

It is always a joy to use the _Oxford English Dictionary_. I haven't looked into my microphotographed version of the first edition in years, since I got access to the _OED_ online, which is a splendidly faster and better way to use the wealth of its words. By folklore (and by original intent) the _OED_ was supposed to include every English word. Indeed, looking at the vast accumulation the _OED_ presents, with its lovely objective history of each word and illustrative quotations, it is easy to imagine that they are all there, and that they were accumulated by lexicographical boffins who just kept putting in everything they found, ordered and alphabetized it, and issued it in print. The near-perfection of the _OED_ does not give much room in itself for researching just how it was made. Lynda Mugglestone has been able to give a unique history of this unique enterprise in _Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary_ (Yale University Press) because of what she says was a chance discovery; however, it is easy to understand that since she has edited _The Oxford History of the English Language_ and written _Lexicography and the OED_, it is clear that chance favored her prepared mind. She "chanced" upon proof sheets from the first fascicle of the first edition of the _OED_, dating from 1883, a section recording proofs of the words from "abandon" to "Anglo-Saxon". The proofs did not have the cool, immaculate presentation of a final form; they "were instead marked by a mass of scrawled annotations and suggested deletions." And these handwritten additions were often acerbic. "Useless" was the remark by the word "anencephaloid", and "Rubbish! Mere tradesman's make-up" adorns "anerithmoscope". Clearly, the cool columns of the finished _OED_ were hiding contention, and a tale of all-too-human endeavor. Mugglestone has brilliantly used the evidence of the proofs to examine just how the monumental work came to be.

Much of this book is about the determination of what to leave out of the dictionary. Mugglestone writes, "Version by version the final text was built up, a process of dispute and negotiation, accretion and dissent." The idealistic goal of including every English word proved to be impossible for many reasons. The _OED_ could not, because of the Victorian times in which it was born, include all the naughty words, for instance. But there were much bigger problems that demonstrate the reaches of lexicographical philosophy. If a famous author (Shakespeare is great for this) invents a nonce word, one used for just one instance, does that get included? What if the author is not so famous? What about words that are recently borrowed from other languages but have not made themselves at home? What about scientific words? There were so many of them, and some were so obscure; it particularly pained the chief editor, James Murray, to leave them out, as his youthful drive to self-education led him through botany, entomology, and geology. What about words that just seem too obscure? Alongside the listing for "opossum", one critical reader of the proofs wrote, "This is the sort of word which one should save on." Murray disregarded the advice that time, but had to accept many more deletions than he wanted: "No one knows as well as I do, how it grieves one to have to do this," he complained. There is a great deal of pithy humor in the letters between the editors as they try to get the definitions right. When Murray was first presented with a proposed definition "greasy pole: a pole rubbed with grease to make it harder to climb or cling to," he suggested that it be amended with "Used as a frequent object of diversion at sport etc." because, he explained, "If something of this kind is not added it looks as if people were so keen on climbing poles that they had to be kept at a distance by the use of grease."

Murray would have been amazed at the dictionary in its current on-line incarnation. The process of deciding what words to include still goes on, of course, but without delegates to complain that each new entry takes more space and more time until the dictionary is complete. While the web-based version still has its pressures and costs, Mugglestone has produced an entertaining picture of how the first version was produced under constraints of column inches that simply do not affect the current version (just throw in a couple more memory chips). I was thrown to the _OED_ repeatedly by this account of the struggle to get the great book out, and the dutiful men who made it happen by fifty years of close attention to detail; I did so each time with increased admiration for this ultimate in English language tools.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Stuck in a web of words, July 6, 2006

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Hardcover)

Mugglestone, according to the jacket, had written in 2002 another book on lexicography and the OED; the vocabulary and style of "Lost for Words" leans much more towards academia than a popularized account. That one was printed naturally by Oxford UP; I could not help but be puzzled that this newer book was published by Yale. I wondered how much of this book was an extension of her earlier text. She gives nothing away in the preface about her previous forays into the preparation of the OED, despite the works she has written that are cited in her bibliography.

She leaps immediately into the evidence of the proof pages and the marginalia they contain about the evolution of the OED. The story of the assembly of the OED has been told a couple of times in the last two decades; Mugglestone adds to these more generalized accounts her archival research into the deletions, editorial battles, concessions to prudery or appeasement, and the sheer bulk of what was left out of the OED. One expects that no word would have not been included, but this book shows how the editors had to cull what was a ratio of 17:1 to 8:1, that is, eight times the entry space and treatment given in Webster's to words. Many words and explanations and citations never made the final cut.

The making of the OED2, and the on-line versions, also account for much of potential interest, but the author wraps her tale up too quickly. I sense her weariness after so much meticulously condensed presentation of the intricate micro-managed debates and proofreading and correspondence that she for two hundred closely argued pages has conveyed. Debates around Darwin, sexuality, religion, and morality entered into its creation--just as wrangles over what's included in textbooks rankle so many sensitive souls in our era. The sheer enormity of the product that the compilers accumulated shows the nature of Victorian industry. The chief editor JAH Murray estimated that he would have to come up with definitions for 80,000 words that he never before had learned or read. This task, doomed never to be completed, makes one marvel at the exertion of the hundreds of volunteer readers who sent in slips and the overworked scholars who with rudimentary filing managed to create a monument to our language.

Intriguing to note that the 1989 OED2 gave only the same definition for "internet" as did the 1901 original entry: "the marvellous maze of internetted motions"--from astronomy. Such details rewarded me, but while I admire Mugglestone's effort, the heaps of material pored over without respite seemed to sink the pace of the book, as perhaps the subject matter made its interpretation equally but fussily detailed.

The book, therefore, is best consulted rather than read straight through. Mugglestone carefully presents every assertion, but this attention to every jot and tittle--while we want it in lexicography--tends to scan less easily in prose paragraph rather than dictionary entry form.

This book I suspect may have been commissioned to follow the success of Winchester's best seller. Those who have read Simon Winchester's more sensationalized recent entertainment "The Professor and the Madman" (absent in the works cited; I corrected this error in my own earlier review after Ms. Carroll castigated me below) or Murray's granddaughter KM Elisabeth Murray's valuable 1977 biography of him, "Caught in the Web of Words," may find Mugglestone's study rewarding due to the intriguing nature of the subject more than the energy of its transmission on the page. Despite my PhD in medieval English, I found Mugglestone's book unexpectedly daunting, if less so than Anglo-Saxon! Fascinating in parts, but this book cannot be read as easily as not only Winchester (which is to be expected) but KME Murray as well. "Lost for Words," perhaps inevitably, gets tangled in its own web of words. As editor of the Oxford History of the English Language, perhaps Mugglestone became too out of touch with the "common reader" who has sufficient advanced education but lacks erudition in lexicography. While she tries her best to bridge the gap between specialization and accessibility, it's a challenge to progress at a sustained trot through this relatively brief but densely rendered topic as presented here.