The making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver (review)

Peter Gilliver’s book on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the genesis of the OED and its history over the next century and a half. This work is erudite, massively learned, and meticulously documented and, by some magic instilled into it, both informative and entertaining. The reader will come away with a greatly enhanced respect for the OED and all its manifold excellences and perceived faults, and those of its many successors, having seen in detail the human effort, skill, sacrifice, drama, and the relentless drive for excellence that have gone into its pages since its official inception at the Philological Society in 1857.

The book traces the history of this ground-breaking dictionary, beginning with the ideas and influences that fed into its conception, through the generations of editors who created it, the many people who worked for it and supported it, the vicissitudes which beset it, including deaths, the loss of data, precarious negotiations with the publishers, the struggle to contain the mountains of data within agreed page limits, the vagaries of readers supplying quotations, lack of resources and unsatisfactory working conditions, and so on. We meet the tireless and dedicated James Murray, the energetic but irascible Frederick Furnivall, and a host of other characters who demand our understanding and respect. Lexicographers may perhaps be drudges, but dull they are not. The book ends with the present state of progress toward the third edition of the OED as it deals with a rapidly changing technological world and new lexicographical challenges.

G’s claim on the first page of the preface that his being an insider and a working lexicographer is of some advantage is amply justified at every turn in this book; indeed, we might realistically claim that this perspective is a fundamental animating principle of this work, giving as it does an empathy for and intimate understanding of the demands involved. G does not specifically point out, as well he might, that he is also a long-standing employee of the Oxford University Press (OUP), and hence not simply a lexicographer; this gives him a still more nuanced view of the tensions between the publisher and its employees and representatives and the dictionary and its lexicographers.

It is no mean feat to digest the multitudinous minutes of meetings, letters, records of negotiations between the OUP delegates, the dictionary editors, and various other interested parties—in short, a mass of minutiae—into a readable and even suspenseful narrative, but G has pulled it off admirably. The richness of documentary material that underpins this book is remarkable.

G has a long and complex story to tell, and he keeps strictly to it, ignoring the obvious temptation of allowing other narratives to intervene. For example, regarding the now well-known and unfortunate history of Dr. William Minor and his immensely valuable work for the OED, only the latter gets some brief attention (see Winchester 1998). The fascinating details of the life and extramural activities of the irrepressible Frederick Furnivall are likewise eschewed. Even his relentless formation of and work with learned societies to provide printed text for the dictionary, while discussed, are not overly stressed.

A somewhat questionable omission was Murray’s conflict with C. A. M. Fennell; Murray laid anxious charges of plagiarism against the editor of the Stanford dictionary of anglicised words and phrases, published in Cambridge in 1892. G mentions this at slightly more length, but omits any consideration of Sarah Ogilvie’s research on the justice of these claims (Ogilvie 2013). This seems odd, given that her book is referred to several times for other matters, and this imbroglio raised in a very specific form the more general question of the place and treatment of foreign words and ‘denizens’ in the dictionary—always a problematic issue.

The story of the dictionary (and the dictionaries it spawned) becomes very complicated, especially as it moves into the mid-twentieth century, but G again explicitly rejects the temptation to...