Book Review

The Meaning of Everything
The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

By Simon Winchester
Oxford University Press
New York / Oxford
CAN $34.95 (hardcover)

Reviewed by Gerry van Blokland

A murderer confined to an insane asylum and his remarkable relationship with the senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary was the subject of Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. In The Meaning of Everything, he sets out to tell the story of the OED itself — “the greatest enterprise of its kind in history.”

We celebrate great achievements. We cheer the accomplishments of great athletes. We turn up the volume and sing along to great songs. You wouldn’t expect the story of a dictionary to inspire the same kind of emotion. You would think that a story about painstakingly scrutinizing and defining words, listing their preferred and variant and obsolete spellings, and recording their etymologies and pronunciations might be a little dull, but it’s not. A talented storyteller, Simon Winchester vividly brings the words of the English language and the people who catalogued them to life. His passion for the dictionary is obvious. He calls it “the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and made, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.”

It wasn’t until the early seventeenth century that the idea of listing and defining the words of the English language — “so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy” — was first conceived. Shakespeare, for instance, wrote most of his plays having never consulted a dictionary, since such a thing had not been invented in his time. (However, Shakespeare’s dearth of reference material may have contributed to the overall growth of the language. He is credited with having added such words as accommodation, dislocate, dwindle, laughable and submerged to the lexicon.)

Early dictionaries, with such titles as A Shorte Dictionary for Yonge Beginners and A Table Alphabeticall, tended to be brief and focus on obscure or “hard” words. It wasn’t until Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language that an attempt to list all of the words in the language — not just the hard ones — was made. Johnson, however, was a less than objective lexicographer. He once gave the definition of the word oats as “[a] grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland feeds the people.” He also had a habit of re-writing illustrative quotations that did not suit his purposes.

According to Winchester, this is where the OED stands out. Not only would it define several hundred thousand more words that Johnson’s dictionary, but it would also ensure that every one of these definitions was as complete and thorough as possible.

The sheer volume of the dictionary alone is great. The first edition of the OED spanned 16,000 pages in 12 volumes, and took over 70 years to complete. (Through a spectacular miscalculation, early estimates had the dictionary finished in a single decade.) 1,827,306 illustrative quotations were used and 227,779,589 letters were required to define 414,825 words accounting for 178 miles of type.

Winchester takes us through the history of the dictionary and introduces us to several of its foremost editors. Herbert Coleridge failed to make any significant progress as Senior Editor, owing to the fact that he died soon after taking the job. Frederick Furnivall worked harder at introducing young ladies to his favourite sport of sculling than on the dictionary. It wasn’t until a Scotsman by the name of James Murray casually mentioned to Furnivall one day, “I rather wish I could have a go at it” that the project finally got off the ground. Murray oversaw the making of the OED brilliantly for more than half a century.

J. R. R. Tolkien, who would later go on to pen the Lord of the Rings trilogy, worked briefly on the OED as an assistant editor. His vast range of expertise — encompassing cartography, linguistics, mythology, history and more — was typical of the sort of person who worked on the dictionary. As a boy, James Murray studied — among other things — Latin, French, Italian, Greek, German, geology, botany, astronomy and archaeology. Murray was supposed to have given a young Alexander Graham Bell his first instruction in electricity. (In fact, rumor has it that Bell was so grateful to Murray that he gave him the first ever telephone, but soldiers staying at Murray’s former home during the Second World War apparently used it as firewood.)

With a wealth of such fascinating anecdotes, behind-the-scenes insight in to how a dictionary is created, and a cast of colourful characters — The Meaning of Everything is a pleasure to read, from A to Zyxt.

Gerry van Blokland lives in Ottawa. He previously reviewed Toothpicks and Logos by John Heskett in the fall 2002 issue of Writer’s Block.