"That brownest of brown studies": The work of the editors and in-house staff of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1903

"That brownest of brown studies": The work of the editors and in-house staff of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1903 Ti Peter Gilliver 'he fact that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) took as its raw material the millions of quotation slips supplied by its readers is well known. The fact that these slips were to some extent pre-processed by a team ofvolunteer sub-editors, working out of house and in advance of the four editors, is less well known, but is referred to in some of the fuller descriptions of the project.1 The fact that the four editors had assistants working alongside them, and presumably playing some part in the transformation of quotation slips into finished dictionary entries, must be apparent to anyone who has seen their names listed in the OED's prefatory matter, in third place after the lists of readers and sub-editors; and of course a few of these shadowy figures can be seen in the background of some of the well-known photographs ofJames Murray in his Scriptorium (see Figure 1).2 But nobody seems to have discussed the work of the assistants, or how they interacted with the editors, in any detail since 1928, when Charles Onions, the fourth editor of the OED, wrote an anonymous account, which appeared in Oxford University Press's magazine The Periodical as part of 'See especially Knowles (2000). I am grateful to Elizabeth Knowles for her comments on an earlier version of this article. 2AIl figures, as listed at the end of this article, as well as material from the Oxford University Press archives and the OED offices are reprinted here by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press. Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 25 (2004) That brownest of brown studies45 Figure 1 James Murray in his Scriptorium at Mill Hill. The date of this photograph is uncertain, but it predates Murray's move to Oxford in 1885. a long article celebrating the completion of the first edition. In this article I hope to present a snapshot of this component of the OED's compilation process, taking as an arbitrary focus the year 1903, exactly 100 years ago. It might be thought that if a sub-editor had done his or her work properly, then all that an assistant would need to do to the subedited material for any given word would be to make a selection of the quotations available, for each sense identified by the sub-editor, to look over the definitions, perhaps making corrections to bring them into line with "house style," and then to pass the resulting pile of slips to the editor for final editing. Of course, choosing which quotations to include, and which to leave out, already gives the assistants an important role in shaping the text; it was explicitly not thejob of sub-editors to make this kind of selection, and so the assistants would be the first to attempt this, even if some of their selections were subsequently overruled by their editor. But the bundles of slips from which the first round of OED proofs was typeset, now kept in the archives of Oxford University Press (OUP), show that the assistants did far more than this. 46Peter Gilliver In these bundles there are quotation slips and the so-called "topslips" that carry the definitions and other editorial text. Figure 2 shows a fairly typical example of a "topslip" from the hand of one of James Murray's senior assistants, a Cambridge mathematics graduate called Arthur Maling who hadjoined the project in 1886. The subject of his degree might seem surprising, but in fact very few of the assistants had formal academic language qualifications. Onions explains that "experience has shown that such training is not so important for much of the work as other qualities, more particularly a sense of method, wide general knowledge, and an interest in some special department of the manifold details which have constantly to be attended to" (Onions and others 1928, 14). Maling remained with the dictionary until its completion in 1928, when his contribution was recognized by the award of an honorary M. A. from Oxford...