The Dictionary People Quotes

“None of his neighbours knew that Mr Collier volunteered for the OED nor that words from their local newspapers would eventually find their way onto its authoritative pages. Thanks to his work, there is a weird bias in the OED towards quotations from the Brisbane Courier Mail. It is now the three-hundred-and-ninetieth-most frequently quoted source in the Dictionary, with more quotations from it than from either Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, or the Book of Common Prayer.”
― Sarah Ogilvie, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

“The number of letters in the English alphabet was only settled in the seventeenth century. Before then, i and j were different forms of the same letter, as were u and v (the form used depended on the position of the letter in the word), s was used for the voiced sound /z/, and f, aka the ‘long S’, represented the voiceless /s/ we know it today.”
― Sarah Ogilvie, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

“Murray took Dictionary work with him to the hospital when Ada was giving birth. If you look at page 2, column 1 of the first volume of the printed Dictionary, twenty-third line from the bottom, you will see a sentence Murray wrote on the proof sheets while sitting beside Ada's bedside just after the birth of their daughter Elise. 'As fine a child as you will see' appears as an example of when a follows an adjective”
― Sarah Ogilvie, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary