The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.Simon Winchester. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary Oxford English Dictionary (OED) great multi-volume historical dictionary of English. [Br. Hist.: Caught in the Web of Words] See : Lexicography . New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Oxford University Press, 2003. In 1928, after 70 years long years of labor, The Oxford English Dictionary (OED OED abbr. Oxford English Dictionary Noun 1. OED - an unabridged dictionary constructed on historical principles O.E.D., Oxford English Dictionary ) made its premiere appearance in twelve volumes containing 15,490 pages of single-spaced print text with 414,825 defined words and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. In The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester, author of the best-sellers Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, and The Professor and the Madman, tells the fascinating story of how that gargantuan gar·gan·tu·an adj. Of immense size, volume, or capacity; gigantic. See Synonyms at enormous. gargantuan Adjective huge or enormous [after Gargantua, a giant in Rabelais' feat was accomplished. The tale begins in 1857 with a speech by Richard Trench, the Dean of Westminster, to the English Philological Society. In this talk he asserted that existing dictionaries were not sufficiently comprehensive and a new dictionary of the English language in its totality was needed. The task of forming that dictionary was assigned to Herbert Coleridge, the grandson of the poet, and he organized a small army of volunteers to help with the job. Unfortunately, Coleridge died a year into the effort and his successor, Frederick Furnivall, did not have the right temperament to move the project forward. Enter James Murray, a school teacher and polymath pol·y·math n. A person of great or varied learning. [Greek polumath with tremendous intellectual curiosity and ambition. Murray took on the job of editing the OED (it could have been the CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) An earlier videodisc technology from RCA that was released in 1981 and abandoned five years later. Like phonograph records, the analog disc contained grooves that a stylus rode over. but the Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). turned down an offer to be the publisher--a later Cambridge editor said this was "the largest wrong decision in publishing history"), and Murray's indefatigable energy and organizing skills were the key factors that brought the enterprise to fruition. The work was also helped by the editing efforts of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, and thousands of volunteers who contributed by researching various words. (One of those volunteers, William Chesner Minor, an American army surgeon and murderer who worked from the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, was the subject of Winchester's last book, The Professor and the Madman.) The Meaning of Everything provides a highly compelling and thorough account of the story behind the world's most comprehensive dictionary (the next edition is due out in the early part of this century). REVIEW BY MARTIN H. LEVINSON, PH.D. EDITOR: MARTIN H. LEVINSON, PH.D. |
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