Bookstrapping: Who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary?
In this week’s column, Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta writes, it’s only in the 19th century that the dictionary began to trace the meanings of words across time and describe how people were actually using them.
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Who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary?
Stumped aren’t you?
We are familiar with the authors of so many books- but the one book that helps us make sense of all the other books- remains a complete mystery to us. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was a crowdsourcing project that took 70 years (1858 to 1928) to complete! Did you know that? The team that came together for the project, the editors and many of the contributors (largely volunteers), made this their magnificent obsession; chasing down obscure words and when they appeared first!
Author Sara Ogilvie ticks all the right boxes; she was not only editor of Oxford Dictionary Australia, but also on the Amazon team that developed the Kindle. She has written a book that makes us question- “why didn’t anyone think of this before?” ‘The Dictionary People- The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary’ is the most obvious book never written until now!
Here are our five Bookstrapping insights -
1. The OED is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are largely unknown. The dictionary itself- as we know it today- is a modern development. Earlier versions of the dictionary were prescriptive- they explained to a reader how something should be pronounced. Its only in the 19th century that the dictionary began to trace the meanings of words across time and describe how people were actually using them.
2. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, the ‘3000’ people she tried to track down were as varied as the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale and a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station laboratory! All of them held somewhat loosely together by Dr James Murray, who died during the compiling of the alphabet ’T’ in 1915, not knowing whether his project would ever be complete!
3. How did these people come together? Dr James Murray asked people to read their local books-and send him small words and quotations on 4*6 inch paper slips. His clarion call was quite powerful; one of the respondents Margaret Alice Murray read the advertisement while she was living in Kolkata. There is no doubt that the OED was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavour in human history, the Wikipedia of its time.
4. Which of the contributors sent the maximum slips to Dr Murray? The award goes to Thomas Austin Jr. who sent a total of 1,65,061 slips. Sarah Ogilvie has labelled 26 chapters as per the letters of the alphabet. Not the most remarkable aspect; but interesting.
5. Ogilvie’s zealous detective pursuit of the identities and stories of the contributors to the OED is very well crafted. The very idea of this book and the author’s approach to it is unique and likely to elicit sharp reactions from people.
There is a serendipity to this book itself; just as theres a serendipity to the OED. In her last days living in Oxford, before taking a teaching position at Stanford, Sarah Ogilvie, who had worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, discovered six handwritten address books noting the names of more than 3,000 contributors to the project. This is what triggered her journey.
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ Asia's first Reading Coach, you can find her on Instagram @OfficialReetaGupta
