The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

Swift was the fiercest advocate of all. He once wrote to the earl of Oxford to express his outrage that words like bamboozle, uppish, and—of all things—couldn’t were appearing in print. He wanted the establishment of strict rules banning such words as offensive to good sense. In future he wanted all spellings fixed—a firm orthography, the correctness of writing. He wanted the pronunciations laid down—an equally firm orthoepy, the correctness of speech. Rules, rules, rules: They were essential, declared Gulliver’s creator.

As one pamphleteer wailed, appropriately: “We have neither Grammar nor Dictionary, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through the wide sea of Words.”

“No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.”

lexicographer (“a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words”),

James Murray was to say in later years that whenever someone used the phrase “the Dictionary,” as one might say “the Bible” or “the Prayer Book,” he or she referred to the work by Doctor Johnson.

And Herbert Coleridge’s early death slowed matters down even more. He died after only two years at work, at the age of thirty-one, not even halfway through looking at the quotations of words beginning with A. He had been caught in the rain on the way to a Philological Society lecture, and he had sat through it in the unheated upstairs room on St. James’s Square, caught a chill, and died. His last recorded words were: “I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow.”

Readers must find and note all and any words that seemed interesting, or that were quoted in interesting and signifying ways or in ways that were good, apt, or pithy.

He wanted readers simply to be able to say: “This is a capital quotation for, say, heaven, or half, or hug, or handful; it illustrates the meaning or use of the word; it is a suitable instance for the Dictionary.”

Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known than the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word—cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one—then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary—a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance—and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.

“I, Sir, am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society,” he said in his finely modulated Scottish voice, “and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. “And you sir, must be Dr. William Minor. At long last. I am most deeply honoured to meet you.” There was a pause. Then the other man replied: “I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest-staying inmates. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.”

The story of this first meeting is, however, no more than an amusing and romantic fiction.

The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at last its great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

One word—and only one word—was ever actually lost: bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s dictionary, was actually mislaid by Murray and was found, a stray without a home, long after the fascicle Battentlie-Bozzom had been published.

It was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.