The Lexicographer's Dilemma by Jack Lynch

Author:Jack Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2000-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

A New English Dictionary was supposed to take ten years, and it was going to occupy two thousand pages spread out over four volumes. Those early estimates ended up being comically inaccurate. Even the first part of the letter A—the dictionary originally came out in unbound fascicles of a few hundred pages each—didn’t appear until February 1, 1884, almost thirty years after work began, and the first volume containing all of A wasn’t published until 1888. Because of the glacial pace, which frustrated the Oxford delegates to no end, Murray didn’t live to see the completion of his life’s work: he died in 1915, when the OED had reached only volume 8, containing the letter Q. But his assistant, Henry Bradley, took it over on Murray’s death, and William Craigie and C. T. Onions supervised the last few volumes. (It was in this phase that a young Oxford graduate, recently evacuated from the trenches of the First World War because of illness, joined the project—J. R. R. Tolkien, who contributed etymologies for many words between waggle and warlock.) The final volume appeared in 1928, seventy-one years after Trench’s lecture, and one week short of fifty years after Murray received his invitation to come to Oxford. Four volumes had become twelve, and 2,000 pages had turned into 15,487. And the number of words? 414,825.

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