History of the Oxford English Dictionary

Began with the speech at the London Library by Richard Chenevix on Guy Fawkes Day, 1857 (103)

Two-part lecture on the subject of dictionaries (79)

"an inventory of the language"; not a guide to proper usage (104)

The history of meaning, the life story of each word

reading of everything and the quoting of everything that showed anything of the history of the words that were to be cited; recruited a team of unpaid amateurs, as volunteers (106)

January 7, 1858 is normally reckoned the starting point, at least on paper (108)

completed in 1928 (25)

Making of Oxford English Dictionary

Rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language (25)

Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries, how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation; and perhaps most important off all, how and more exactly when each word slipped into the language in the first place (26)

Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary

Herbert Coleridge (the first editor)

early death at thirty one years old

died after only two years at work

not even halfway through looking at the quotations of wors beginning with A

Frederick Furnivall

Took over after Herbert Coleridge's death

Dozens of editors and publishers refused to work with him

Volunteers lost interest

Oxford

Proposed book to be acceptable, that Murray might well be the man and that the big dictionary could in fact one day have the commercial and intellectual appeal that Oxford wanted (112)

James Murray 

April 26, 1878, first meeting with the Delegates

March 1, 1879, Document was formally agreed upon: James Murray was to edit, on behalf of the Philological Society of London, the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles

Build a corrugated iron shed called the Scriptorium.

Volunteers and the Oxford English Dictionary

James Murray Published a four-page appeal - "to the English-speaking and English-reading public" - for a vast fresh corps of volunteers

Would write to the society offering their services in reading certain books

Each volunteer would take a slip of paper, write at its top left-hand side the target word, and below, also on the left, the date of details that followed

Title of the book or paper, its volume and page number and then below that the full sentence that illustrated the use of the target word

William Minor

The invitation seemed a long-sought badge of renewed membership in the society from which he had been so long estranged

He had something valuable to do

Made a key, a Victorian word-Rolodex, a dictionary within a dictionary, and it was instantly available

His practice was first to write to the dictionary and ask what letter or what word was being worked on

contribution was "Second only to the contribution of Dr. Fitzward Hall"

Originally called A New England Dictionary of Historical Principles

Referred to simply as the "big dictionary"

Itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct

Twelve mighty volumes: 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used

no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known than the word being defined

all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary