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- Working in The 'Scriptorium'
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- Arguments and Blow-Outs
- Words 'Lost to History'
- A Constant Evolution
There had been a "go-to" wordlist, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, since 1755. But Williams says it included made-up definitions and idiosyncratic spelling, and was "completely incomplete". The Philological Society of London decided they needed a better dictionary — one that documented every single word in the English language ...
Murray enlisted the help of thousands of ordinary people. He sent a call-out to the public, in pamphlets distributed far and wide and republished in certain journals, asking people to find quotations from magazines, journals, books or newspapers containing words he and his colleagues were looking for. People from all around the world began mailing ...
The rustic scriptorium, with its busy-bee lexicographers and garden surrounds, might sound idyllic, but it contained tension, too. "There would be these perennial arguments about which words were worthy of being in the dictionary and which weren't," Williams says. Murray wanted a dictionary that documented all words, including the colloquial or inf...
Williams researched the original dictionary for her book, The Dictionary of Lost Words. She was curious about what words were left out, given one specific criterion for entry. "If a word wasn't written down, it never had a chance of being in the dictionary," she explains. "How many situations, particularly pre-20th century, would there have been wh...
The Oxford dictionary, which recognises that the English language is continually evolving, constantly collects new words and new meanings. And words are never removed — they form part of the dictionary's picture of history. "It's fascinating to see the trajectory of a word and [their] life cycles," Williams says. "Climate emergency" was the 2019 Ox...
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Jul 21, 2021 · The real-life story of how the first Oxford English Dictionary was compiled is truly stranger than fiction. In 1879, James Murray, who was self-taught having left school at 14, was employed by the ...
- Rachel Nixon
The Second Edition of the Dictionary, published in 1989, was an amalgamation of the text of the First Edition with that of the Supplement produced in 1972–86, combined with approximately five thousand entries for new words and meanings. Dedication to the Queen (1989) Preface to the Second Edition. The New Oxford English Dictionary Project.
Aug 25, 2016 · Abstract. This book tells the history of the Oxford English Dictionary from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. It explores the cultural background from which the idea of a comprehensive historical dictionary emerged as a new concept in the lexicography of English, and traces the process of bringing this ...
- Peter Gilliver
Nov 24, 2009 · Plans for the dictionary began in 1857 when members of London’s Philological Society, who believed there were no up-to-date, error-free English dictionaries available, decided to...
The making of the Oxford English Dictionary. By Peter Gilliver. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii, 625. ISBN 9780199283620. $65 (Hb). Reviewed by R. W. McConchie, Nummi, Finland reter umiver s dook on me uxjora ungusn Dictionary (unu) traces me genesis 01 tne ut.u and its history over the next century and a half.
