I’m not sure you can train that into somebody. So I think what you need to be a good lexicographer is sensitivity to nuance in language-really, really fine distinctions-and the ability to write about them clearly. Family meal times would degenerate into discussions of the semicolon. The reason I’m a lexicographer, I’m sure, is because both my parents were language teachers, and we argued about language all the time.
I take pride in telling people that my highest qualification in any language is ‘O’ level. Since so many English words are foreign in origin, do you have to be good at lots of languages to be a good lexicographer? You might find them inscribed on an Anglo Saxon tombstone or a sword recovered from a bog. The oldest words in the language are the ones that go back to Old English - so whatever the earliest records of English are, maybe 5th or 6th century. Is it half a million? When you’re only working on one word, you don’t really know how big the rest of it is.
But, realistically, I think people now find works of reference of that size far more useful in electronic form. When we eventually finish the whole process, revising everything from A to Z, if there was a market for the printed version of the dictionary, then I’m sure OUP would print it. To ask the question, ‘How many volumes is it?’ is immaterial because at the moment, the interim text of the dictionary, the text we’ve revised so far, is only available online.
#OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY BOOK ABOUT PLUS#
Well, the second edition, which came out in 1989, was not a revised edition, it was the text to the first edition plus a whole lot of supplementary material for new words and new meanings that had been researched in just the same way over the mid-20th century. We’ve been – I say ‘we’ because I’ve been working on the dictionary since the 1980s… The first edition of the dictionary was completed in 1933 in 13 volumes. His name was Frederick Furnivall, and then eventually James Murray, the well-known first editor of the dictionary, took over in the 1870s. Somebody else took over, who was very energetic, but very unfocused. The first editor of the dictionary died very soon after taking up the task.
The appeal went out: ‘Who wants to read for the dictionary?’ So the quotations on which the Oxford English Dictionary is based began to come in, and continued to come in for about 20 years. The problem is, this is the pre-computer age you can’t just look through databases to find the earliest example of the word ‘peanut.’ You have to have lots and lots of people reading lots and lots of books from the whole history of English, and not just books, but newspapers, manuscripts, anything that is a dateable piece of evidence. In the 1850s, the idea of doing it for English began with the Philological Society of London. You need to collect evidence for what those different meanings might be, examples of the word in use over the history of the language, which is a great idea that people started to have in the 19th century. You want to know not just what a word means now, but what it has meant at all stages in its history. It’s called a dictionary ‘on historical principles.’ The fundamental historical principle is that a word should be able to tell its own story by real examples of that word, showing how it has been used. No, it’s a dictionary that aims to tell the whole history of the English language by telling the story of each word. It’s not a dictionary you would turn to if you quickly needed to look up a word you’ve forgotten the meaning of, is it? Let’s start by you telling me what the Oxford English Dictionary is.