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Two decades ago, Oxford University Press invited David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Simon Winchester and five other distinguished writers, as well as one bookish journalist, to contribute usage notes to the then-forthcoming <a href="https://amzn.to/3tkBpNF" target=_blank>Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus</a>. While the monetary compensation wasn’t extravagant, the publisher sealed the deal with one irresistible perk: Each of us was given the 20-volume 1998 second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the years since then, I’ve read and dipped into a half-dozen books about the OED, being especially intrigued by the early history of this monumental work’s first edition, begun in 1858 and only completed in 1928. Even then the long-familiar 13-volume set — a fixture in the reference section of college libraries — did not appear until 1933. In its pages, one found not only the definition and pronunciation of some 414,825 words, but also brief quotations from printed texts illustrating each word in actual use, starting with its first known appearance in print. That first recorded citation would be followed by a small number of additional quotations, in chronological order, showing the word in action over the subsequent centuries. This is what makes the OED a historical dictionary.

Penguin Random House

In 1977, the OED’s major editor, Sir James Murray, inspired a superb biography called “<a href="https://amzn.to/3PO2IYt" target=_blank>Caught in the Web of Words</a>,” written by his granddaughter K.M. Murray. But, as Sarah Ogilvie reminds us in her wonderful new book, “<a href="https://amzn.to/3Qa65ds" target=_blank>The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary</a>,” Murray’s editorial work depended on an army of some 3,000 unpaid volunteers — Victorian polymaths and eccentrics, specialists and autodidacts of all kinds, and even patients in mental hospitals. These were the men and women who supplied all those quotations that are the particular glory of the OED.

‘You Could Look It Up’: The world before and since Wikipedia

In the 19th-century equivalent of crowdsourcing, Murray advertised for people to transcribe brief passages from their reading that illustrated how unusual — and common — words were used. Contributors would copy the quotations onto small slips of paper, each a uniform 4 by 6 inches, so that Murray and his subeditors could then sort them into 1,029 pigeon holes before the best were allocated to the appropriate entries in the dictionary. By 1880 the Scriptorium — as the dictionary’s central workroom was called — had accumulated 2.5 million slips.

Courtesy of Sarah Ogilvie

Having spent 14 years as a lexicographer for the OED, Ogilvie must have found it natural to structure her book as a kind of abecedary, using the alphabet to impose order on what is essentially a delightful grab-bag of brief biographies. In her first chapter, “A for Archaeologist,” she relates the early life of Margaret A. Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist now mainly remembered for “<a href="https://amzn.to/45mKjYx" target=_blank>The Witch-Cult in Western Europe</a>,” which contended that pagan rites were practiced in secret throughout the Middle Ages. But as a young woman growing up in India, Murray mailed the Scriptorium some 3,800 citations<b> </b>drawn from the Douay version of the Bible.

Under “C for Cannibal,” Ogilvie lingers over Sir John Richardson, who, besides having eaten human flesh — to stave off starvation during a search for the Northwest Passage — was also one of three known murderers who provided quotations for the dictionary. Later, under “M for Murderers,” Ogilvie discusses the other two: One is William Chester Minor, an American doctor confined to England’s Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane, who became Murray’s fourth-most prolific contributor. Simon Winchester recounts Minor’s story, in counterpoint with Murray’s own, in his enthralling 1998 bestseller, “<a href="https://amzn.to/46Jbc9T" target=_blank>The Professor and the Madman</a>.” The third murderer turns out to have been the pioneer of stop-motion photography, Eadweard Muybridge, who coolly shot his wife’s lover dead at point-blank range but, with the help of lawyers paid for by his patron Leland Stanford, won an acquittal.

A much sadder chapter sums up the life of Eleanor Aveling, nee Marx, the daughter of the author of “<a href="https://amzn.to/3LWC9PG" target=_blank>Das Kapital</a>.” Like a character from George Gissing’s “<a href="https://amzn.to/46FKHSI" target=_blank>New Grub Street</a>” (1891), Aveling took up all kinds of literary work, just hoping to earn a few pounds. Despite some success, she ultimately fell into despair and died by suicide. Still, her translation of Flaubert’s “<a href="https://amzn.to/3QerWAL" target=_blank>Madame Bovary</a>,” which until recently provided the base text of the Norton Critical Edition, must have been read by thousands of college students.

Even Henry Spencer Ashbee, the probable author of the pornographic “<a href="https://amzn.to/46tnGTu" target=_blank>My Secret Life</a>,” volunteered his services to the OED, regaling the embarrassed Murray with the technical terms for various sexual practices and bodily functions. Ashbee eventually willed his library of erotica — the finest ever assembled — to the British Museum, which until the 1960s kept it locked away in its Private Case. In another fascinating section of this eye-opening book, Ogilvie recalls the life and literary career of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece, who formed an incestuous lesbian couple, contributed to the dictionary, and wrote critically admired poetry and verse-drama under the pen name Michael Field.

Again and again, “The Dictionary People” emphatically demonstrates that even seemingly dry-as-dust scholars weren’t that at all. Joseph Wright started work as a donkey-boy in a quarry at age 6 and didn’t learn to read until he was 15. Yet he ended his life as professor of comparative philology at Oxford and author of a multivolume dictionary of English dialects. Frederick Furnivall, who preceded Murray as the OED’s editor, founded the Early English Text Society, the New Shakspere Society (so spelled), the Robert Browning Society and many other literary sodalities, as well as the Hammersmith Sculling Club for Girls. Alexander John Ellis — an expert on phonology, the science of pronunciation — was said to be tone deaf, being unable to tell “Rule, Britannia” from “God Save the Queen.” He regularly wore a coat with 28 pockets, in which one might find almost anything: Ellis, writes Ogilvie, “made a noise like a kitchen drawer as he walked.”

Robert Taylor

While many of the OED’s volunteers and editors may be little known today, at least one is now world famous. In 1919-1920 the young J.R.R. Tolkien researched etymologies for words beginning with W, just the kind of linguistic work needed for the creation of Middle-Earth and its languages. And even though Murray died in 1915, Tolkien would certainly have seen photographs of the white-bearded scholar, who looks the very model of a Middle-Earth wizard. (For more about the influence of the OED on the author of “The Lord of the Rings,” consult the charming book “<a href="https://amzn.to/46MW37y" target=_blank>The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary</a>,” by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner.)

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Over the years, Murray and his wife had 11 children, but, like so many intellectuals, the workaholic editor sometimes wondered if he had misspent his life. At one such moment he wrote: “The greatest sacrifice the Dictionary entailed upon me, by far, was the sacrifice of the constant companionship of my own children, and I doubt it was worth the sacrifice. I have tried, as a husband and father, to do what should have been the work of a celibate …; no wonder it has been a struggle. But has it been worth it?”

Most of us think it was. Ogilvie reports that all of Murray’s children turned out exceptionally well, many of them receiving first-class degrees from Oxford and later pursuing successful careers as civil servants and missionaries. Alas, Murray himself died in the middle of the letter T and never saw the completion of his life’s work. But to him and all the “unsung heroes” celebrated in “The Dictionary People,” we owe much of our appreciation of the range, beauty and history of the English language.

<b>The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary</b>

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and author of the memoir “An Open Book,”  the Edgar Award-winning critical study "On Conan Doyle," and five collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book,” “Classics for Pleasure” and "Browsings." 

Michael Dirda

Book review: The Dictionary People, by Sarah Ogilvie

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