Non-Fiction Picks: In the beginning were the word nerds

Dennis Duncan

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the earliest known person to mention a sponge cake in writing was Jane Austen. Austen is also our earliest source for “doorbell,” not to mention “sprawly,” “fragmented” and “irrepressible.”

When the OED was conceived in 1857, the proposal that started the ball rolling declared that it should be “an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view.” Unlike its predecessors, the new dictionary should be descriptive rather than prescriptive, including all the words of the language, current and archaic, high-blown and vulgar.

It should trace their shifting meanings over the centuries, and always — crucially — support its assertions with the evidence of published quotations.

But how to do this? To find, for every word in English, its earliest appearance along with the moments when it branches into a new sense? An editor was appointed and a list of likely texts for inspection drawn up, but the real work had yet to be assigned.

Ahead lay millions of hours of reading and mulling, logging any word that seemed unusual or used in a distinctive way.

For this, the general public would be enlisted: The OED would be a crowdsourced project. Appeals were issued far and wide, with The NYT remarking wryly that readers with “any superfluity of words about them” should contact the British Philological Society.

In fact, those who volunteered to read for the new dictionary would be given somewhat clearer guidance, particularly when responsibility for the project passed to the greatest and longest-serving of the Dictionary’s editors, an irrepressible autodidact by the name of James Murray.

Potential contributors were asked to “make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way.”

Each should be written out on its own paper slip, 6 by 4 inches or a half-sheet of notepaper, along with the text (plus date and edition) in which the quotation appeared.

All slips should be returned to Murray and his sub-editors working from their “Scriptorium,” an ice-cold shed in the back garden of Murray’s house on the outskirts of Oxford.

This was a perfectly sensible plan until things turned sprawly. When Murray took the reins in 1879 he estimated that the OED would be completed within a decade.

He was off by 40 years. Murray would not see further than the letter “T,” expiring as he did on a summer’s day in 1915, soon after writing his last definition, “twilight.”

In 1928, at a dinner to celebrate the work’s completion, prime minister Stanley Baldwin began his oration by running through the OED’s vital statistics: its 15,000 pages, its 178 miles of type, its 400,000 main entries supported by two million illustrative quotations. “Perhaps before I begin, I may make a confession,” he deadpanned. “I have not read it.”

Now Sarah Ogilvie in her new book, “The Dictionary People” has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers, the “word nerds”, who made up the bulk of the OED’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time.