Winchester, Simon. The meaning of everything; the story of the Oxford English Dictionary.

WINCHESTER, Simon. The meaning of everything; the story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford Univ. Press. 259p. illus. bibliog. index. c2003. 0-19-517500-X. $13.95. A

Winchester's witty, humorous book celebrates the world's most authoritative compendium on English words and idioms from the emergence of the language from Anglo-Saxon or Old English. The text is a worthy companion piece to Winchester's best-selling biography, The Professor and the Madman (1998). He follows the history of the English language with a salute to forerunner linguists Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster and to the contributors who volunteered literary research and summaries of each word's beginning and acquired meanings through the medieval, Renaissance, and modern eras. The immense five-decade task required the organizational skills of scholarly geologist James Murray, the editor-in-chief who hired experts like Anglo-Saxon specialist J.R.R. Tolkien, Civil War surgeon William Chester Minor, the eccentric Frederick James Furnivall, and a clutch of lexicographers at the Ashmolean Library to provide vision and accuracy in assuring dictionary users the most fastidious examination of every word in the language. Extending to 15,490 pages and 22 volumes, the OED followed an idiosyncratic entry style that Winchester explains in the epilogue with a two-page contrast to earlier works. This volume is sure to fire the intellectual curiosity of word mavens. Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Hickory, NC