Quote:
Originally Posted by fantasyfan
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester may not sound like the most exciting book ever written. In fact, it is much more enjoyable than one would expect. The OED is one of the greatest academic works ever compiled and by common consent the greatest English Dictionary of all. It took seventy years to complete and it's first four editors did not live to see that completion.
Winchester is not an academic and he presents the story mainly through interesting anecdotes, and by focussing on the various personalities and their often bitter clashes and varied motivations throughout the enormous project--the progress of which was by no means smooth. In fact there were several times when the possibility of ever finishing the work seemed very bleak indeed.
Most of the book is about James Murray the third principal editor whose vision informed the entire idea--and indeed which continues to this day in the second edition and the concept of a third electronic version. This breathtakingly brilliant Scotsman who could speak and/or read over thirty languages and whose formal education ended at the age of 14 is considered the greatest lexicographer since Samuel Johnson.
His story alone is worth knowing and it is bound up intimately with the great Oxford English Dictionary.
|
I read
The Professor and the Madman (P.S.) (aka The Surgeon of Crowthorne) by Simon Winchester
Spoiler:
From
Wikipedia
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester that was first published in England in 1998. It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.
It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. The 'professor' of the American title is the chief editor of the OED during most of the project, Sir James Murray. Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and he had taught in schools and worked in banking. Faced with enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray had turned to an early form of crowdsourcing (a word not coined until the 21st century)— enlisting the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.
and found the whole story extraordinary. I had never even thought about how a dictionary was actually made or even how it was done. The "madman's" knowledge and the vast amount of information he provided was amazing.