Look up spaniels in a leather-bound dictionary and the general gist will be about a dog with long ears and a silky coat. You’ll need to delve into an Encyclopaedia – perhaps Colliers’ comprehensive New Encyclopaedia of 1921 – to get a feel for how those ears feel or how broad the muzzle is – but if you are in a rush to get somewhere, a dictionary will usually suffice. These days the smartphone appears to have become the medium of choice, what with its embarrassment of apps or, if truly tech-ed up, some sort of smart device that sits next to the fruit bowl quietly eavesdropping on your domestic tittle-tattle; all so the faceless tech overlords can later manipulate adverts across all your social media, whilst you sleep. And sigh. But back when time was slower and Terry Wogan dominated the airwaves, it was the Oxford Dictionary to which one turned to, to answer the question: ‘what is a spaniel?’
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the dictionary of all dictionaries. A sort of Attenborough, Shakespeare, Beckham type three-pronged attack for the English language; all bound up in dusty leathery volumes that reek of pipe smoke and call the calming tick-tock of a grandfather clock. No serious academic researcher or scholar is without one on the study shelf, sitting loose, or stacked up with the other serious stuff; a long way from Ken Follet. The dictionary does not just tell what a spaniel is, it also explains the development of the word, including – if relevant – meanings which are no longer used. It also gives examples: ‘The spaniel sniffed the lurcher’s bum.’ Etc. To get an idea of the thickness of such a proper grown up dictionary, the PR from today’s publisher will tell you that it would take a single person 120 years to type out the near 60 million words of something like the OED. Take the verb ‘set. It alone requires 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. No small task.
British prime minister Stanley Baldwin described the OED as a “national treasure”.
The OED actually took shape in 1844. Three chaps were sitting around one night, and with the candle burning low and the claret dry, there was whispered agreement that the dictionaries of the day were rubbish. Pants. And something needed to be done. One man was Richard Chevenix-Trench who, as a well-regarded philologist of the day, did much to promote the English tongue. It was his paper On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which first stirred the linguistic porridge bowl. Trench, leaning in on the lectern at one of the Philological Society’s bearded hoo-haas flared his nostrils and, with spittle clinging to the top lip, described a new dictionary; a better dictionary, one that was, to quote a revved up colleague, a ‘lexicon totius Anglicitatis’. Indeed. Basically this was no elbow patches on the corduroy jacket, this was purple velvet all the way down to the hem. Trench later became Dean of Westminster Abbey and so the OED’s first editor was actually Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; founder of the Romantic Movement and the man who did much to help introduce German idealist philosophy to the stuffy supper tables of England. You can assume Herbert had some linguistic form. Indeed, after taking a double first in Classics and Mathematics from Balliol, he took to the bar and dedicated his short life to words. He sadly died from TB at just 30 years of age.
With work on the dictionary beginning to take shape, it was the third member of the original supper party who then took up the editorship: one Frederick Furnivall whose father, George, had cleaned up – financially speaking – from running the Great Fosters lunatic asylum in Windsor. Great Fosters was formerly the London seat of Sir John Dodderidge. ‘The King’s lawyer?’ you mutter. Indeed the same Sir John who would have been the first call King James I would have made if he were ever to have been nicked brawling in the Kings Arms at the bottom of the High Street. Incidentally, and although unconfirmed to this day, it was widely rumoured that King George III was treated at the Great Fosters towards the end of his life, as his mind started to pop apart at the seams. Furnivall was, though, a poor editor. Despite his enthusiasm and impressive beard, Furnivall was impatient, slapdash, ill-disciplined and lacked accuracy. He chewed through sub-editors like a spaniel would a chocolate éclair, and would later resign after realising he was more of an ideas guy. He recruited a Scot, a James Murray, a man who had a no trouble dotting his eyes and crossing his teas. Murray got stuck in with the help of many of his eleven children and lots and lots of volunteers. It would, though, be another fifty years before the OED was complete.
The OED‘s readers contribute quotations: the department currently receives about 200,000 a year.
Crucial to the completion of the chunky book of words was the input of W.C Minor, a Yale-trained surgeon, and ex-officer in the Union army in the American Civil War. Minor was also a criminal lunatic locked up in Broadmoor after fatally flattening a man in Lambeth with a high velocity revolver; thinking the man, who was on his way to work to support a family of six urchins and a pregnant wife, was intending to rummage through his drawers in search of silver cuff-links to flog in the market. Despite evidence along the lines of smoking gun/ dead body/ wobbly lip, Minor was deemed mad, and packed off to Broadmoor. Whilst being labelled mad he was, perhaps in the context of his contemporaries, also deemed low risk and was given a bean bag and access to books. It is thought that through his correspondence with some London booksellers, he read something about the need for volunteers in piecing together the OED. With not much else to do, bar avoiding eye contact in the shower-room, he dedicated pretty much the rest of his life to flicking through his large personal library of antiquarian books and fancying together quotations that illustrated how particular words were used. Minor’s relationship with Murray later became a book – The Surgeon of Crowthorne – the rights of which were snapped up by some wet-lipped Hollywood mogul who, breathing sweet Vodka-Martini breath, muttered something along the lines of ‘Mel would love this’. Indeed Mel Gibson, he of the rough Scottish brogue, saw James Murray as the ideal high-brow foil to his mud-caked William Wallace and talked his good friend – and convincing lunatic – Sean Penn into playing the productive, but volatile, Minor. The film did not bother the Oscars.
Murray died in 1915 having polished the sections A-D, H-K, O-P and T. Nearly half the dictionary. Another senior editor Henry Bradley who had been forced upon Murray by the Oxford University Press who were getting a little clammy at the HS2-like progress, managed to nail down E-G, L-M, S-Sh, St and W-We before he himself died. It was left to a few others, get it over the line.
The OED was finally published in 1928.
Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer, the Bible is the most quoted work.
Stick one in the library.
Hepburnsays 