The Meaning of Everything

I just finished reading The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. I hadn’t read any non-fiction in a while and really enjoyed this account about how the initial twelve-volume, 414,825 word mother-of-all-dictionaries was put together over the course of seventy-some years [the last volume of the original dictionary was published in 1928]. Not just the story of how a bunch of words made it into neat columns on a page, this is a story of history (of both the English language and the Dictionary), vision, ideas, dreams, romance, determination, policking, intrigue, suspense, madness and death, and is filled with interesting characters and tidbits of information for you to bring up at the water cooler or an upcoming cocktail party.

Just as I was embarking on the book, I read the Expatters' review of Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, essentially a tangential story of the OED [which apparently should have remained tangential] that prompted Winchester to write the whole history of the Dictionary. An interesting account of one of the OED’s most loyal volunteer readers who turned out to be a criminally insane American corresponding with the editor of the OED from his prison cell in England, the story of The Professor and the Madman are explained in two to three pages in The Meaning of Everything. An enjoyable story, but I cannot imagine reading two hundred pages of it! In any case, I give The Meaning of Everything a 7.75 for overall enjoyment.

Some of the tidbits in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary that I found most interesting:

· Dictionary-makers of the English language have historically chosen to tackle the language from an evolutionary as opposed to a prescriptive perspective, meaning that English dictionaries tend to define words according to how they are commonly used, as opposed to just by the original meaning of the word. In contrast is the French language which is controlled by a board and new meanings for words are only reluctantly accepted after much tribulation. Furley: unfortunately this means that your concern with people using the word regime when they actually mean regimen does not bode well for the continued purity of the language…

· The letter S provides the greatest volume of words. The letter C provides the second greatest volume, equal to A and B combined.

· J.R.R. Tolkien briefly worked as an assistant on the Dictionary

· Set is the most complex word in the dictionary

· The editors of the original OED started, not surprisingly, with the letter A. Later on they admitted that due to the fact that it was the first letter they conquered, not all the quirks of the process were ironed out and consequently the A section was not as strong as it could have been. In order to not compound a double learning curve, the editors of the second version of the OED decided to start with the letter M so that by the time they got around to A, they would not be repeating any inaccuracies that the original team may have made.

· The editors claimed that any humour found in the dictionary was totally inadvertent. Hard to believe when there are entries such as this: Abbreviator: An officer of the court of Rome, appointed … to draw up the Pope’s briefs …

· In 1971, the OED along with its various supplements was compressed into two volumes (with four original pages per page) which required, and came with, a magnifying glass for reading it. We had this version while I was growing up and I remember hauling out the volumes as well as the magnifying glass to check out some obscure word or another!

· Canada’s University of Waterloo was involved in the task of transferring the OED into a computer-based format in the 1980s following a massive donation of computers from IBM.