The Case of the Missing Attributions: Tracking the Source of OED’s Sources on South Asia1

This article explores a discrepancy in the pages of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary between the timing of the acknowledgments of the use of the proofs of Henry Yule’s Hobson-Jobson as a source for quotational evidence, on the one hand, and quotations apparently drawn from Hobson-Jobson prior to the decision to acknowledge their source. Research in the archives of Oxford University Press indicates that the initial lack of acknowledgment of Hobson-Jobson may have been inadvertent. Editor James Murray and his staff appear to have been using information supplied by Edward Brandreth, a subeditor with access to Yule’s proofs who submitted approximately 25 percent of the quotations for headwords starting with “A” that appear in both dictionaries. This evidence forms the basis of an assessment of the relationships between Brandreth, Murray, and Yule and of Murray’s policies about the use of evidence from others’ dictionaries in the compilation of his own.