The Dictionary People

Sarah Ogilvie. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. x + 370 pp. $30.

I should prefer that my biographer should have to say, “Oxford never made him a Fellow or a D.C.L., and his country never recognized his work, but he worked on all the same, believing in his work and his duty.”

Sir James A.H. Murray (1837–1915), primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (1879–1915), in a 1908 letter

“He worked on all the same”: so too did those whom Sarah Ogilvie calls the Dictionary People, the worldwide volunteer assembly of readers who between 1858 and 1928 became Readers for the OED, sending in quotations from their reading on 4 × 6 slips of paper for all words that struck them, in Murray’s description, as “rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.” The OED was a great work of crowdsourcing, “the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century,” as Sarah Ogilvie calls it, the product of a “radical and open process.” But not absolutely open: Murray himself thought that extracting quotations was the only work of value that what he called “the average amateur” could manage. Above Readers were Subeditors, who sorted bundles of slips, and Specialists, who advised on etymologies, meanings, and usage. And at the heart of things sat or stood Murray and his assistants, working in the Scriptorium, the iron shed behind Murray’s house where the Dictionary (Ogilvie always capitalizes it) achieved its form.

Sarah Ogilvie has a long and intimate knowledge of the OED, having worked as an editor and having written both a doctoral dissertation and a previous book about the Dictionary, Words of the World: A Global History of the OED (2012). And she has visited the site where Murray’s Scriptorium stood. It’s fitting that she had the extraordinary luck to happen upon the materials in the OED archive that made The Dictionary People possible: three of James Murray’s address books and another three that belonged to the earlier editor Frederick Furnivall, with names and addresses of Readers — three thousand of them — and detailed, sometimes cryptic notations about their work. The Readers were a various lot: autodidacts and members of learned societies, vicars and murderers, inventors and poets, men and women with all manner of expertise and interests. How to write about some of them? Alphabetically, course, in chapters from “Archaeologist” to “Zealots” — the zealots being Murray, Chris Collier (a prolific contributor of slips in our time), and, I think, Ogilvie herself.

We meet some extraordinary people in these chapters. Alexander John Ellis (D: “Dictionary Word Nerds”), a gentleman scholar, expert in music, mathematics, and pronunciation, carried in a twenty-eight-pocket coat named Dreadnought letters and papers, a knife sharpener, a corkscrew, and a scone — among many other items. He is said to have been one model for Henry Higgins. Eleanor Marx (H: “Hopeless Contributors”), a writer, translator, and socialist (and Karl’s daughter), sent in words, not quotations, and expected to be paid for her work. William Herbert-Jones (N: “New Zealanders”) awed unsuspecting British audiences with his fanciful magic-lantern presentation of “New Zealand, Wonderland of the World,” whose flora and fauna included non-existent plants and non-existent fifteen-foot-tall birds. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Q: “Queers”), an aunt and niece in a decades-long lesbian relationship, wrote poetry and plays together using the penname Michael Field, whose work is quoted in the OED more than two hundred times thanks to other Readers reading “his” work.

The research that went into The Dictionary People — the work of Ogilvie, student assistants, librarians, and archivists — is of staggering proportions. And at times, the details and divagations become overwhelming. There are countless inventories of words whose presence in the Dictionary we owe to a particular Reader; brief asides about words absent from or present in the 1928 Dictionary (absent: appendicitis, condom; present: feminism, suffragette), and lengthier discussions of varied topics: the scientific observation of weather, spelling reform (“had a long tauk widh him about foanetiks”), and the “Dictionary War” between Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. There are details that charm: for instance, the unattributed sample sentences with which Murray marked the birth of a daughter. “As fine a child as you will see” illustrates the article a following an adjective; “The new arrival is a little girl” illustrates arrival. Knowing a bit about rabbit holes, I know the importance of knowing when to stop. But I understand the impulse to keep going, for it’s unlikely that there will be another book about the Dictionary’s Readers.

Ogilvie describes James Murray — a Scottish Nonconformist who left school at fourteen — as a perennial outsider at Oxford. In the year before his death, the university at last awarded him an honorary doctorate. And now the Dictionary’s Readers, too, have had their work recognized.

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[D.C.L: Doctor of Civil Law, I think. There are no notes in The Dictionary People : I found the source for “I should prefer” in K.M. Elisabeth Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Ms. Murray (1909–1998) was James Murray’s granddaughter.]