Abstract. Once, the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin noticed, "Our history, our novels, our poems, our plays - they are all in this one book." This book is called the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Its first edition was issued in 1928. How long did it take to complete it? How many people were involved? What challenges did they face? Is the OED still developing nowadays? To answer these questions, let us look at the story behind the creation of this amazing book.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a dictionary is reference work that lists words, usually in alphabetical order, and gives their meanings and often other information such as pronunciations, etymologies, and variant spellings.
The history of any dictionary is long and many-faceted. The earliest dictionaries, such as those created by Greeks of the 1st century AD, emphasized changes that had occurred in the meanings of words over time. The close juxtaposition (an act or instance of placing two elements close together or side by side in order to compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences) of languages in Europe led to the appearance, from the early Middle Ages on, of many bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. The movement to produce an English dictionary was partly prompted by a desire for wider literacy, so that common people could read Scripture, and partly by a frustration that no regularity in spelling existed in the language. Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabetical (1604) was the first purely English dictionary, containing some 3,000 words. In 1746-1747 Samuel Johnson undertook the most ambitious English dictionary to that time which included a list of 43,500 words. Noah Webster's dictionary of Americanisms in the early 19th century became known to the public. The immense Oxford English Dictionary was begun in the late 19th century.
It took more than 70 years and tons of volunteer labor to create The Oxford English Dictionary-including an assist from a murderer. It was built on volunteer labor.
In 1857, The London Philological Society came up with the idea for a new dictionary of the English language. The editors came to the decision that it was necessary to ask for the help of the public sending examples of sentences that could describe the meanings of different words. Every day, volunteers mailed thousands of "quotation slips" from various sources, such as books, magazines, and newspapers. More than 2000 volunteers had assisted the editors in its completion by the time the first edition was published.
At the beginning, the Philological Society thought that the dictionary would take about 10 years to complete. Unfortunately, twenty-seven years later, the editors had successfully reached only the word ant. Anyway, they decided to begin publishing unbound editions of the work-in-progress in 1884. The first full volume was eventually published in 1928. It was more than 70 years after the society first came up with the idea.
One of the dictionary's founders was Frederick Furnivall whose organizational skills were quite poor to deal with such tedious work. Under his leadership as editor, the dictionary was a disaster. Quotation slips were stuffed haphazardly into bags and went missing. All of the words starting with pa were eventually discovered in Ireland. Slips for the letter g were nearly burned as trash. All of the entries for the letter h somehow were found in Italy.
Dr. James Murray, a philologist, became the dictionary's principal editor in 1879. He remained in that position until the time when he died in 1915. Dr. James Murray was a linguistic superstar. He was proficient in French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, German, Flemish, and Danish and also had a solid grasp of Portuguese, Provençal, Celtic, Slavonic, Vaudois, Russian, Persian, Achaemenid Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, and Phoenician.
In 1885, to better organize the dictionary, Dr. James Murray constructed a sunken shed made of corrugated iron to house the editors and their quotation slips. Called the "Scriptorium," this linguistic workshop had 1029 pigeonholes that allowed Dr. James Murray and his subeditors to arrange, sort, and file more than 1000 quotation slips each day.
Only one quotation slip - having the word bondmaid - is known to have been lost. As they found out, it fell down behind some books and the editors never noticed. Dr. James Murray was very embarrassed by his failure to include the word in the dictionary. The word was officially introduced only in a 1933 supplement.
One of the volunteers providing the OED with countless quotation slips was William C. Minor, who was a schizophrenic person imprisoned in the Broadmoor Insane Asylum in Berkshire, England; he fatally shot a man who, as he believed, had broken into his room. According to Dr. James Murray, Minor was the dictionary's second most outstanding contributor, even outdoing members of the full-time staff. Inspired by a true story, in 2019, a biographical drama film The Professor and the Madman directed by Farhad Safinia (under the pseudonym P.B.Shemran) came out. It was based on the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (published in the United States as The Professor and the Madman) by Simon Winchester. The Professor and the Madman is a fascinating look at a unique friendship that produced something extraordinary - the Oxford English Dictionary.
What is the most complicated word in the Oxford English Dictionary? Set. In the dictionary's 1989 edition, this word contains 430 shades of meaning and requires a 60,000-word definition. Other short words with endless definitions are run (396 senses), go (368 senses), and take (343 senses).
Originally, the OED had a limited audience. It was a set of expensive and bulky books. Moreover, it took up an entire bookshelf. In 1971, the Oxford University Press decided to issue a smaller, complete version that compressed nine pages into one and had only two volumes. Unfortunately, the text was so tiny that the two-volume book came with a magnifying glass. Immediately, it became one of the bestselling dictionaries on the market.
It took more than 120 typists, 55 proofreaders, and a total of 67 million keystrokes to digitize the entire contents of the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 1980's. This process took 18 months.
The OED's most quoted source is, in fact, the British daily newspaper The Times, which has 42,840 quotations (nearly 10,000 more than William Shakespeare). The Scottish novelist Walter Scott and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, were coming in third and fourth, respectively. Geoffrey Chaucer, not Shakespeare, is the first in introducing new words.
Each year, about up to 5000 new words, senses, and subentries are added to the Oxford English Dictionary. For years, the last word in the book was zynthum (a type of malty beer made in ancient Egypt). Only in 2017, zynthum was usurped by zyzzyva (a type of South African weevil). The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 500 new and revised words, phrases, and senses, such as nice-to-have, swear jar, and with a cherry on top. Only in December 2023, there were 53 new words added to the dictionary, including Ckekhov's gun and chumocracy.
As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English where the focus is on present-day meanings. You still may find present-day meanings in the OED, but you will also find the history of individual words, sometimes from as far back as the 11th century, and of the language - traced through 3.5 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts, song lyrics, and social media posts. However, that's not all the OED is. It offers a wide range of teaching resources, educational virtual events, video guides, and interactive quizzes. Even though it started its life more than 150 years ago, The Oxford English Dictionary is constantly evolving.
Литература
- Сысоев П.В. Лингвистический корпус, корпусная лингвистика и методика обучения иностранным языкам/ П.В.Сысоев // Иностранные языки в школе. - 2010. - № 5. - С. 12-21.
- Discover the history and development of dictionaries [Online].
URL: https://www.britannica.com/summary/dictionary(дата обращения: 02.02.2024). - Fascinating Facts About the Oxford English Dictionary [Online].
URL: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/574505/oxford-english-dictionary-facts (дата обращения: 21.01.2024). - The Professor and the Madman (film) [Online]. URL:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Professor_and_the_Madman_(film) (дата обращения: 02.02.2024).
- The Story Behind the Creation of the Oxford English Dictionary [Online].
URL: https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/history-of-the-oed/?tl=true (дата обращения: 10.01.2024). - Oxford English Dictionary [Online].
URL: https://www.oed.com/information/updates/december-2023/ (дата обращения: 07.02.2024).