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The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

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The Oxford English Dictionary is an unrivaled monument to the history, beauty and complexity of the English language. The story of the men and women who made this marvelous work makes for compellling reading, especially in the hands of such a skilled storyteller as Simon Winchester.

"The Professor and the Madman," Winchester's first best-seller, was the story of Dr. W.C. Minor, an American who had gone to England in what was a vain hope of regaining his sanity. Instead, he committed a senseless murder, and was imprisoned in an asylum for life. Minor found redemption in his otherwise ruined life by devoting decades of service as a volunteer reader/researcher for the OED.

In his introduction to this volume, Winchester explains that an editor at the Oxford University Press suggested that since he had written a footnote to the story of the great enterprise, he might want to undertake the main story. Fortunately for us, he took up the suggestion with enthusiasm.

The pace of the narrative never falters in its entire 250 pages. The opening chapter provides a brief overview of the evolution of English and of previous efforts to compile a truly comprehensive dictionary of the language--and why all fell short of that lofty goal.

What became the OED enterprise had its origins in the late 1850s, but the first completed dictionary pages did not see the light of day until the early 1880s. Why the project was almost stillborn, how it survived deaths, disorganization, lack of funds and innumerable other setbacks--all of this is brought vividly to life in Winchester's tale. Even when the great editor James Murray took the helm and the project finally emerged from chaos, it still faced obstaces, especially from those who would have sacraficed quality in order to produce a swifter, but less authoratative, final product.

Today, the third edition of the OED is in preparation by a staff working in modern offices, making use of all the tools of twenty-first century information technology. The contrast to the conditions facing makers of the original OED, laboring by hand, sorting tens of thousands of slips of paper into pigenhole slots in an ugly, dank corrugated tin shed (grandly named the "Scriptorium" by Murray) is startling, and makes their achievement all the more amazing--and grand.

Dr. Minor makes a brief appearance in the story, along with some of the other unusual and exemplary volunteer contributors from around the world who combed nearly 800 years of English literature to give the OED its impressive depth. While none of the other's stories may be quite as extreme as Minor's, it's clear that for many, their involvement in this great cause (with no pay and little recognition) also gave depth and meaning to their lives.

It's the vivid, human qualities that Winchester illuminates so well make this a great story...one that you won't want to miss.

In a world of uncertainties, there is at least one human effort we can count on. For 75 years, if you have needed to know about an English word, you could turn to the _Oxford English Dictionary_ and you could expect enlightenment. You could know you were getting the authoritative low-down on any word you might come across, and you could not only find its definition, but its history of use given in quotations dating from its very first known appearance in print. For word fans, using the _OED_ is a joy, and every turn of the pages in its monumental volumes registers new affection and admiration for an unequalled intellectual accomplishment. Five years ago, Simon Winchester wrote _The Professor and the Madman_, an inspiring account of an inmate of an asylum who helped compile the _OED_'s words. It was a footnote to the _OED_'s larger history, and now, in _The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary_ (Oxford University Press), Winchester has given that history with the same humane and appreciative tone of his first book on the subject. Anyone who uses English ought to know the _OED_, and anyone who loves the _OED_ will find this book fascinating.

Winchester gives a fine brief guide to the history of our language, and shows that by the Victorian age, philologists felt a comprehensive dictionary was needed. In 1842, the Philological Society settled on a proposal of a gargantuan dictionary, one that would have old words and new, one that would have every word and every meaning for that word. There was certainly something of power in such a scheme; great men and great ambitions would push the influence of English throughout the Empire, nay, the world, and increase the influence of Britain and her church. The story of the _OED_ is inextricably the story of the chief editor for the original edition, James Augustus Henry Murray. He was the son of a Scottish linen draper, and after a rural upbringing, he had to leave school at 14 because of poverty. However, by that time, he had developed precocious interests in geology, astronomy, archeology, and plenty of other fields, especially languages. He became a teacher at a boys' school in London, but in 1879, he was appointed editor of the dictionary project. Murray was not just a lexicographic and organizational genius, however, but a cheerful and persistent diplomat, who was adept at dealing with difficult personalities and making friends with those who were originally nuisances. He was also a family man whose very happy marriage produced eleven remarkable children. The children never had pocket money but by earning it in sorting dictionary slips. One wrote, "Hours & hours of our childhood were spent in this useful occupation. The motive actuating us was purely mercenary." One unforeseen result of this upbringing is that when the crossword puzzle craze came on, all the Murray children were brilliant at them.

Murray himself died in 1905 and did not live to see the completion of the work in 1928 (there was a supplement in 1933 for all the new words that had been put in use since the start). But he knew himself that there would really be no completion of the work any more than the language itself would be complete. A dictionary is a snapshot of current language, a verbal description that rapidly goes out of date. There has been a second edition, and a web-based version, and a Revised Edition is being worked on, which will possibly weigh a sixth of a ton and comprise forty volumes. Perhaps, though it will appear in only an electronic form. But Murray's basic plan for the dictionary was so good that the plan has remained intact, and the book will continue reflect the growth of our language. The _OED_ is still looking for volunteer readers, to make slips for new words and also to try to find previous usages for words already in. For instance, according to the _OED_'s last bulletin, if you can find a source for the phrase "pick up steam" (that is, to accelerate) from before 1944, the editors want to hear from you.

There were some human endeavours of the modern world which were to be known to posterity as spetacularly gigantic, given the difficulty, hardship and human toil to have them fully completed. The British effort to build the Suez Channel, and the American on the turn of the 19th century to build the Panama Channel, are good examples of such gigantic steps the human race took in order to bridge distant lands and to easy communication between peoples of distant lands. The same could be said of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a fenomenal task both by the ample range of its scope, which was to solidify and market English as the leading language of the world, and by the number of people involved in the project. Editors? Eight. Number of pages? More than 20.000. Number of entries? More than 400.000, and so on. The task , which initially was estimated to take some 10 years, did not reach its end before many decades passed.

The Meaning of Everything, by Simon Winchester, is a detailed account of the making of the OED, and the reader is entitled to a full range of the most interesting narrative concerning the idiosincratic personalities of each and every successive editor of the dictionary, specially of the legendary Scottsman James Murray, with whom the dictionary is most commonly associated, due to the maturity of purpose the project acqurired in his experienced hands. By the way, Murray was a polymath, a man grown up in poverty but with a keen curiosity and many different interests and who spoke/read more than 25 languages. The many photographs of him and of the many editors are a good add-on to the book.

The expert author guides the reader trough the intrincacies of the project, beginning with a very adequate explanation of the origins of the English language, as viewed from Victorian Britain, and its evolution trough the maze of influences the language received from Old English, Old German, French and Latin. A good portrait of what was the idea at the time concerning what a good dictionary should have is also given, thus permitting the reader to have a balanced judgement of the task to be performed.

To sum it up, The Meaning of Everything is a good book to everyone interested in the origin of languages and in interesting bios of many very special men. I hope you enjoy it as I did.

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was a huge project, far larger than I would have suspected. It took decades to prepare and used several thousand volunteers. Its leaders were men of varying abilities and eccentricities and Simon Winchester captures all of this in The Meaning of Everything. However, this book is written in a more formal language style than are some of Winchester's other books, making it a little less fun to read. This is one of the two books that Winchester has written about the creation of the OED, the other being The Professor and the Madman. The Meaning of Everything takes a more global perspective of the OED's creation, offering a greater explanation of this undertaking. The Professor and the Madman looks at the life of one unique, prolific contributor to the OED and is therefore more interesting and fun to read. If you are not interested enough in dictionaries to buy both books, then I recommend The Professor and the Madman. But this book was not as good as the other in explaining how the OED was developed, so be prepared to not understand everything. If you are sufficiently interested, or you want to have a thorough look at the development of the OED, then read The Meaning of Everything first. It doesn't reveal any information that would make The Professor and the Madman less fun to read.

Oddly enough, I first became fascinated by words and their meanings many moons ago when I learned the difference between etymology and entymology (and had to use the "trick" of remembering that, because it contained an "n", as did the word insect, entymology was the word which meant the study of insects, and etymology was the word that defined the study of the history and development of words). The world, thank goodness, is full of people who love words and language, and Simon Winchester is one of those people. His enthusiasm comes through on every page of this wonderful book. One gets the impression that Mr. Winchester, if he possessed a time machine, would happily go back to, say, 1880, and be one of the numerous and unsung readers that sent in "slips" to the editors of the "great dictionary project," to show the various historical usages of words. As Mr. Winchester points out, this was a labor of love by the few who were paid, and by the many who were unpaid. The man who was mainly responsible for the form the dictionary assumed, its thoroughness and layout, and who guided the great project from when he signed a formal contract in March 1879, up until his death in 1915, was James Murray. (The 1879 contract, by the way, specified that the project would be completed within 10 years. It wasn't. The OED wasn't completed until 1928, 13 years after Murray's death.) Murray was an amazing man. Although he had very little formal education, he was intellectually formidable - being familiar with over 20 languages. As Mr. Winchester points out, though, Victorian England seemed to produce an inordinate number of such people - and quite a few of them contributed to the creation of the dictionary. A great deal of the fun of this book comes from learning about the personalities of some of these people. Murray's predecessor, Frederick Furnivall, was a brilliant man, but he lacked staying power and lost interest in the project - leaving things in a muddle. (When Murray took over he had to try to track down millions of the vital "usage slips" that were scattered all over the place - Furnivall had some and readers all over England, Europe and North America had others. There were sacks and sacks of crumbling, moldy, wet, and sometimes illegible slips. One sack had a dead rat in it. Another sack had a family of mice living quite happily amongst all that paper, which was perfect "nesting material.") Unfortunately for the dictionary, Furnivall seemed to be more interested in women. He dumped his wife and, at the age of 58, took up with his 21 year old secretary. He was also very interested in sculling, and managed to combine his two favorite interests by frequenting the local teashop and gathering up as many pretty waitresses as he could, and taking them out on the river to teach them the joys of sculling. Another interesting man was Henry Bradley, who became joint senior editor in 1896. He had taught himself Russian in 14 days, and had the uncanny ability to read a book when it was upside down. Mr. Winchester also mentions that the editors sometimes consulted "linguistic advisers," such as James Platt "who knew scores of languages and once famously declared that the first twelve tongues were always the most difficult, but having mastered them, the following hundred should not pose too much of a problem." Sometimes Mr. Winchester mentions a contributor only, I suspect, because of the author's love of language: he relishes telling us about the "magnificently named" Hereward Thimbleby Price, who was born in - are you ready for this? - Amatolakinandisamisichana, Madagascar. The author tells us that the dictionary was supposed to take 10 years, but it took 54; it was supposed to be 7,000 pages, but it wound up being 16,000; and, it was supposed to cost 9,000 pounds, but wound up costing 300,000 pounds. Lest you think think the delays and cost overruns have something to do with British academic quirkiness, Mr. Winchester informs us that it is much more a matter of thoroughness. He points out that a German dictionary started in 1838 was not finished until 1961; a Dutch dictionary started in 1851 was not completed until 1998; and the Swedes, who started a comprehensive dictionary back in the 1800's, are currently stuck on the letter S. "The Meaning of Everything" is a great story, well and lovingly told by Mr. Winchester, full of incredibly bright and interesting people, and - best of all - giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the labor-intensive creation of this great dictionary.

This is a wonderful history of the OED - why it was started, its development over a long period, and most of all about the editors who made it.

There's only a little about the supplements and editions after the first, but that's no matter. The focus of the book is on the editors, and especially their eccentricities, and the difficulties put in their way by the sponsors of the dictionary, Oxford itself and its Press, by their collaborators, and by the language itself.

Incidental to the story, but at least as interesting, is something of the process of making a historical dictionary, and the development of English over the last 2500 years.

Brilliantly written, although some anecdotes are repeated which makes me think that Winchester was in a bit of a hurry.

Of the fifty or so books I've read this past year, Simon Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything" has been my favorite. Winchester essentially begins by giving the reader a solid platform regarding the origins of English vocabulary and then continues with one of the most incredible stories...the seventy-one year compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

This could have been a rather dry display but Winchester's wit and warmth are evident everywhere. From Herbert Coleridge through Frank Furnivall to James Murray and the thousands of people who contributed to the OED, this is a story of dedication and sacrifice. How many times the project could have been scrapped only to be saved by fated interfacing and intervention. This may indeed have been the first worldwide project and one gets the picture of a giant ant colony moving about to service the queen.

Just as important, the author colorfully depicts the late Victorian era (the 1880s and 1890s) and shows how that was directly connected in many cases to the work of the OED's editors and sub-editors. Through it all, through all the personal clashes, work slowdowns, doubts about the progress of the dictionary, the work went on. And on. The critical turning point was James Murray's refusal to abandon the principles of his efforts because it was felt on more than one occasion that the work was going along at a slower than necessary pace. Thanks largely to Murray, the OED is the defining (pardon the double entendre) dictionary of the English language.

Winchester closes his wonderful book by comparing how much more easy the work is today than how it was one hundred years ago as the updates and revisions continue. He correctly points out that because of the expanding nature of English dictionaries become out of date as soon as they are printed. This may be a sobering thought to lexicographers (and their publishers!) but the loftier thought is the one of language expansion. I highly recommend this book not only for its remarkable content but for the style in which Simon Winchester has delivered it.

Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything seems at first glance to merely be a sequel to the popular The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary. But I found The Meaning... to be a vastly superior book. Frankly I think that The Professor... would have made a good, long, chapter in this book (as it is you have several pages of rehash to retell Minor's story).

I think what makes book better is that Winchester has more meat to chew on. The making of the OED was not a simple affair and the whole thing seems to have very nearly met its end on more than one occasion. The book reads like a fantastic novel, complete with good guys and evil villains. And along the way you get to learn a good deal about a) the English language, b) lexicography (Dictionary study) and c) the English society that produced such a monumental (in all meanings of the word) work.

I felt a little cheated towards the end when the last 70 odd years of the OED are wrapped up in a few pages. I would have found it fascinating to learn more how the work of gathering up new words for the planned 2007 edition has changed since the original plan in the 1860s. And Winchester still tends to wander just a bit too much for my taste.

All in all a good solid read that will entertain and edify at the same time.

The towering products of the English language include several disparate kinds of works - the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Chaucer, the Authorised King James Version of the Bible, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the book that is the subject of Simon Winchester's text, the Oxford English Dictionary. Contrary to the belief of some who might never have seen the dictionary, this is no 'mere' dictionary. Some people have the two volume edition that comes in a box-slip case with a magnifying glass (I remember being offered one such when I belonged to a book club twenty years ago), whereas major libraries will have the larger-print 20 volumes of words.

This is a publication still in progress. The OED now has plans for a BBC television show that hunts for words and word origins; the website edition of the OED is in constant revision and very heavily used. According to the OED, 'The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.' How did it come to have such authority in the English language?

One thing to consider about the difference between English and a language such as French is that there is no definitive central authority that has official imprimatur over linguistic matters. Unlike the French Academe (which does itself have to bow ultimately to public convention in matters of common use), English has been for most of its time a flexible, fluid language born of competing strands within the Indo-European language family - words have Germanic, Latinate, Celtic, Greek and other influences; in the more recent times, Native American, African and Asian words have crept into common use.

Winchester's book gives a look at the early days of the development of the major project, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the kind of language world in which this project would exist. How does one trace English language words from a diverse island of speakers who have expanded beyond that island to become a worldwide empire?

Winchester's prologue gives a good story of the inauguration of the first edition (then twelve volumes, described as 'twelve mighty tombstone-sized volumes') of the OED in the Goldsmith Hall, with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin presiding over a grand ceremony fit for a king on Derby Day. The then editor-in-chief William Craigie had been knighted and given an honourary degree from Oxford in recognition of his efforts; however, he had not been at the helm for the duration, for the task of coming to this point had begun over 70 years before - William Craigie had yet to be born when the OED project started.

Winchester gives a short description of the history and state of the language, including earlier attempts to produce dictionaries. 'Not one of them - not Johnson, not Webster, not Richardson - ever did the English language justice.' None came close to containing all the words in the English language. The pursuit of a thorough dictionary began as a pursuit 'both learned and leisured'. Progress was slow, and sometimes looked as though the whole process might falter - indeed, in the first twenty years, a mere 40 pages were in type, although hundreds of thousands of words had been collected and organised in note card fashion, stored in pigeon-holes. There were issues early that threatened the comprehensive nature of the dictionary project - Herbert Coleridge, the first editor, had moral objection to certain words being included. These were not the typical curse words, but rather words like 'devilship'. Coleridge died young, however, 'on the quintessentially English date of 23 April - both the Feast of St. George and the birthday of Shakespeare'. Coleridge's estimate of 100,000 quotations was a grand underestimate, but he did set the project on a trajectory from which it would eventually succeed.

Perhaps the most interesting characters part of this tale are Fitzedward Hall, a hermit who was obsessed with the OED project, and William Chester Minor, a murderer-lunatic whose involvement in the project was nothing short of remarkable. One can imagine that were Hall alive today, he would be obsessively glued to a computer screen tracking down words and word origins and typing up little emails to submit to the OED editorial team. Minor's way of reading, described here by Winchester, reminds me in many ways of the method by which internet reviewers sometimes size up books in preparation for writing reviews, with prodigious regularity.

This is a wonderful text, fascinating in the many details and broad in scope of the project that in many ways encompassed the whole of the English language.

"I rather wish I could have a go at it."
No one could have ever estimated the foundational determination behind such a simple statement. It was uttered by the 38-year old bank clerk, James Augustus Henry Murray in response to a suggestion that he consider becoming the editor of the then floundering Oxford English Dictionary project. Indeed, at the time (March, 1876) all indications were that the unprecedented mammoth work, intended to supercede previous efforts by Samuel Johnson, Charles Richardson, and Noah Webster, would fail.... that it would in fact never reach completion.
But it was completed, and this is the story of the arduous journey of the OED.
Winchester has written a fascinating, well researched book. I enjoyed every moment of reading it. [I suppose I may be biased in that I have had an interest in the OED for a long while, and still dream of perhaps owning it one day]. When I told friends what I was reading, several of them looked at me like I was crazy. "You're reading a book about a dictionary?"
But Simon Winchester is passionate about his topic, and really, his reader finds out that there is a lot more to the compilation of "the meaning of everything" than you could ever imagine. Incredible feats of organization and participation were required. Incredible setbacks were overcome, time after time. Hundreds and hundreds of people were enlisted in a project lasting over seven decades. The result, in 1928, was a mind-numbing 178 miles of typeface within twenty volumes of morocco leather! And in its revisions, the OED remains to this day, indisputably, the world's greatest dictionary of the English language.
James Murray would not live to see the finished product. This honor would fall to the then Editor-in-Chief, Sir William Craigie. However, it was as certain to all of those working through the final stages at that time, as it is to us reading of it today, that were it not for the heroic determination of Murray, the OED as we know it, would most likely never have survived the initial complications of its existence. It would not exist today.
Winchester has told a grand, wonderful story about a process that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could be as boring as cabbage growing.
He brings it to life. It is one of the best things I've read all year.
T.y.L.i.I.