The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

(And to Oxford’s undying shame there is even one word—though only one—that all admit was actually lost during the seven decades of the OED’s preparation—though the word was added in a supplement, five years after the first edition appeared.)

“Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.”

As Isambard Kingdom Brunel was to bridges and railways, as Sir Richard Burton was to Africa, and as Robert Falcon Scott was soon to be to the Antarctic, so these men were the best, the makers of indelible monuments to learning—of the books that were to be the core foundation of the great libraries all around the globe.

Trench’s underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.