The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (review)

The history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; or A new English dictionary on historical principles, as the work was originally titled) is long and complicated. Work on the dictionary began in the mid-1850s—inspired by the proposal of Dean Trench, at the time Archbishop of London and later Dean of Westminster, that the Philological Society should prepare an unabridged English dictionary—but the first edition of the dictionary was not complete until 1928. In the interim numerous problems plagued the project. For instance, Herbert Coleridge, who was technically the dictionary’s first editor, died at the early age of 31, and his successor, Frederick Furnivall, was occupied with numerous other commitments, alienated numerous volunteer readers and subeditors, and involved himself in numerous disputes, including one with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne which lasted nearly six years. In fact, the dictionary, which was originally planned as a 7,000-page work to be fully funded and published by Oxford University Press at an estimated cost of 9,000 pounds, and which was projected to be completed in ten years, eventually ballooned into a 16,000-page work that cost 300,000 pounds and took 54 years to complete.

This volume, as the subtitle indicates, recounts the long history of the OED’s preparation. The author is not a professional lexicographer or linguist, but rather a journalist and writer; the book is not a scholarly treatise on lexicography, and those expecting such a work will be disappointed. However, the work does not pretend to be a scholarly treatise. It is a piece of popular scholarship and thus must be evaluated as such. And, happily for those interested in the subject matter, it is a well-written, highly absorbing work, filled with various interesting facts (e.g. Winchester points out that Kenneth Grahame modeled the character of the Water Rat in The wind in the willows on his friend Furnivall (64)), and a worthy companion to W’s earlier work in this area, The professor and the madman (New York: Harper Collins, 1998). That earlier work was, in W’s words, ‘essentially a footnote to history’ (ix); this book is ‘the history itself’ (ix). It is to be hoped that it will find the wide readership it richly deserves.