The history of the Oxford English Dictionary (continued)

The First Edition 1857 - 1928

IV

Amid all the turmoil of assembling the old material, collecting the new, and reducing both to some kind of orderly arrangement, Dr Murray was working out the lines on which the editing of the Dictionary was to proceed. The problem of the best means of indicating the pronunciation, for example, was under consideration for a long time, and was decided only after the views of various authorities had been duly taken into account. Correspondence on this subject with Isaac Pitman, James Lecky, and W. R. Evans, was still in progress in the summer and autumn of 1881 and the spring of 1882, and the notation finally adopted was submitted to, and accepted by, the Council of the Society on 17 March of that year.

Meanwhile the preparation of the letter A was making progress with the material then available. As early as 16 May 1879 this had advanced as far as aby, covering 557 words, and providing enough copy to make 36 pages of the Dictionary. A year later this had increased to 160 pages, going as far as al. By May 1881 the question of typography was being discussed, and there is mention of a specimen page in June. About the same time, the desire to settle down definitely to the real work of editing becomes obvious in the statement that ‘the general amassing of quotations must cease with the present year’.

It had been estimated that three years would be required for all this preparatory work, and the estimate proved to be correct. On 19 April 1882, the first batch of copy went to the printer, and in his report to the Philological Society on 19 May, Dr Murray had the satisfaction of being able to announce ‘the great fact ... that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which 48 columns have reached me in proof’. To fill the first part, however, extending from A to ant, more than a thousand columns were necessary, and the task of providing these occupied the remainder of that year, and the greater part of the next. Finally, on 18 January 1884, advance copies of Part I were exhibited at a meeting of the Society, publication took place on 1 February, and the ‘New English Dictionary’ at once took its place as an incomparable record of the English tongue, far surpassing all that had yet been accomplished or even dreamt of in the field of lexicography.

The beginning had been made; how to continue the work rapidly was the next question that called for solution. Simple arithmetic indicated that there was need for an increased rate of production, though it was not clear how this was to be attained. In May 1884 Dr Murray thought that with six good assistants ‘it might be possible to produce two parts in the year, and thus finish the work in 11 years from next March’. This suggestion was no doubt justified by the facts as they were at that time. That it failed to work out was certainly due in great part to the fact that A was not a good letter on which to base the calculation, and to a steady increase in the material which could not at that time be foreseen.

All the work necessary to produce the first part had been done in the original Scriptorium at Mill Hill. It was clear that greater progress could be made if the editor could devote all his time to the work and be in closer touch with the printing at the Clarendon Press. As early as 1882 the idea of removal to Oxford had been suggested, but it was only towards the end of 1884 that the proposals began to take definite shape. The practical aspects of the question having been settled, the removal took place in 1885; a new Scriptorium was erected in the garden of the house at 78 Banbury Road, and here Dr Murray and his staff carried on their work for the next thirty years. The Scriptorium was not in itself lacking in space, but when into it were packed all the accumulated material, the necessary works of reference, and the tables, desks, and chairs required by the editor and six or seven assistants, it presented a crowded scene to the eye of the visitor. If John Baret had been able to look into it, he would have hailed it as another Alvearie, with a swarm of workers as busy as those who helped him to compile this own volume.

In the new quarters the Dictionary continued to make progress, and Part II, containing the words from Ant to Batten, appeared in 1885. By that time it had become plain that some editorial co-operation was necessary to increase the rate at which successive parts could be produced. Here again the Dictionary was fortunate, as it had already been in rising, in Dr Murray's hands, out of the apparent impasse into which it had fallen ten years before. When Part I was published, the editor of the Academy handed it for review to Henry Bradley, who had but lately arrived in London, and was yet comparatively unknown in the world of scholarship. His review, which appeared in two parts, on 16 February and 1 March, at once marked him out as one of the few who were competent either to appreciate the Dictionary at its proper value, or to offer useful criticism. So clear an indication of possible help was not overlooked, and by July Bradley was assisting in the preparation of the latter part of B. From January 1888 he was independently editing the letter E, and continued with this and F while still engaged in other work in London. In 1896 he also moved to Oxford, and with his staff found quarters in the Clarendon Press itself.

From 1888 there were thus two distinct sections of the Dictionary simultaneously in progress, Dr Murray doing the whole volume occupied by C, and the half volume containing D, while Bradley completed that volume with E, and began the next (Vol. IV) with F. Down to 1900 the letters published, with the respective dates of the preparation of each, stand as follows:

In all this work the part played by the assistants who formed the staff of each editor was of the greatest importance. While considerable training and experience are required by every one, however well qualified, it is also true that the real dictionary worker is born and not made, and that no application or diligence will ever make up for the lack of natural aptitude for the work. The two earlier editors, and those who came later, were fortunate in having the services of a number of such assistants, some of whom (and those among the best) became connected with the Dictionary in its earlier stages and remained faithful to it for periods of twenty, thirty, and even forty years. Without their unflagging and efficient aid, no editor could have coped with the task without so much expenditure of his own time that the end of it would have been beyond all calculation. If those who read the original prefaces to the various letters will note the names that occur time after time at the end of these, they will do right to recognize that the bearers of these names have throughout many years borne the greater share of the labour by which the Dictionary was made possible.

Among these assistants a natural subdivision of labour readily established itself according to the special interests of each. Some became experts in preparing copy for the printer, drafting articles which required only a few editorial changes, or actually writing them in a form which admitted little or no improvement. To these fell the task of taking up the work already done by the sub-editors, of incorporating new material, of making fresh additions that were obviously required, of distinguishing senses and sub-senses, of writing the definitions, and of reconciling the historical order of the senses with their logical development from the original meaning of the word. This became a highly complicated task in the case of common words with a long history, such as the most frequently used verbs, adverbs, or prepositions. The difficulty of these had become apparent even in the early period of the work, and formed the subject of comment by Dr Murray in 1881:

In returning to me his last batch, Mr. Jacob mentioned to me that the division of the meanings of the verb Set, and the attempt to put them in satisfactory order, had occupied him over 40 hours. In examining his results, with 51 senses of the simple verb, and 83 phrases like set-out, set-off, set-down, - 134 divisions in all - I do not wonder at the time. I suspect that the Editor will have to give 40 more to it, for the language seems not to contain a more perplexing word that Set, which occupies more than two columns of Webster, and will probably fill three of our large quarto pages.

When set finally came to be done, more than thirty years later, it took nearer 40 days than 40 hours to digest the mass of examples which had accumulated by that time; the word occupies a column more than 18 pages of the Dictionary, and extends to 154 main divisions, the last of which (set up) has so many subdivisions that it exhausts the alphabet and repeats the letters down to rr. Other words like get, give, go, put, take, may not rival this, but each of them required a vast amount of preliminary labour on the part of some assistant, which was of the greatest value in saving the time of the editor and giving him a clear basis on which to work.

Other assistants developed special ability in checking and verifying references readily and correctly, in finding earlier or desirable examples of words or uses, or in reading proofs and making additions to the material at that stage. When a staff had all these elements properly represented and distributed in it, and certain preliminaries to the work on each letter (such as the copying of glossaries, concordances, and indexes) had been fully carried out, steady progress could be made, and was made to an extent which seemed marvellous to foreign scholars acquainted with the difficulties of lexicography, but unfamiliar with the practical methods of overcoming them.

For the obtaining of full or accurate information on special points, it was frequently necessary to apply to outside authorities of the most varied kind. The services rendered by these were partly acknowledged on the title-page of the earlier parts and volumes in the words ‘With the assistance of many scholars and men of science’. How many these were may be seen at large in the original prefaces to the various letters, but it should also be noted that there were many in those lists who would not have claimed to belong to either of these learned classes, but who could and did supply the information wanted with a clearness and fullness which made the editor's task easy, and gave him confidence in the correctness of his statements. If various errors to be found in standard works are not repeated in the Dictionary, it is frequently because someone with a practical knowledge of the subject had been specially consulted on the point, and had freely given the information required.

When the Dictionary had reached the stage of the first proof (regularly supplied in set of eight columns), it was found to be of much value to send these to various readers deeply interested in the work, to receive the benefit of their criticisms, suggestions, and additions. In this way many improvements were made, errors and misprints eliminated, and the history of words and senses more fully illustrated. In the latter respect the contributions of Dr Fitzedward Hall were of special value by reason of his own collection of material. His regular reading of the proofs extended over some twenty years, and after his death his collections for the later letters were placed at the service of the editors. Among nearly a score of others who reviewed the proofs for shorter or longer periods special mention should be made of Mr Henry Hucks Gibbs (Lord Aldenham), who also in other ways gave valuable help and encouragement in the early stages of the work; of Miss Edith Thompson of Bath, Canon Fowler of Durham, and Mr A. Caland of Wageningen in Holland, who not only supplied many fresh quotations, but as a foreign student of English frequently noticed points which did not so readily strike the native eye.

Back to contents