He had decided, as Murray was to decide a century later, that the best way—indeed the only way—to compile a full dictionary was to read: to go through all literature and list the words that appeared on hundreds of thousands of pages. It is an axiom that you have three overlapping choices in making a word list. You may record words that are heard. You may copy the words from other existing dictionaries. Or you may read, after which, in the most painstaking way, you record all the words you have read, sort them, and make them into a list.
