Book Review//The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

For most of us, dictionaries simply exist. We don’t think about who wrote them; it is as if they sprang into being fully formed. Obviously, this is not true and this lovely book brings to life the many people who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary.

The story here is one of amateurs collaborating alongside the academic elite during a period when scholarship was being increasingly professionalized; of women contributing to an intellectual enterprise at a time when they were denied access to universities; of hundreds of Americans contributing to a Dictionary that everyone thinks of as quintessentially ‘British’; of an above-average number of ‘lunatics’ contributing detailed and rigorous work from mental hospitals; and of families reading together by gaslight and sending in quotations. This extraordinary crowdsourced project was powered by faithful and loyal volunteers who took up the invitation to read their favorite books and describe their local words not just so that the bounds of the English language could be recorded for future generations but so they could be part of a project that was much bigger than them.

One day, in the corners of the Oxford University Press basement where the Dictionary’s archive is stored Sarah Ogilive came across a record of the hundreds and hundreds of people who had contributed words to the Dictionary. That find spawned an ongoing project. Ogilvie became fascinated with the different contributors, large and small, and this book is the result. Each chapter progresses alphabetically with a group of people starting with “A for Archaeologist” and ending with “Z for Zealot”. Sometimes the connections in the chapters are slightly tenuous and force the chapter to go in a certain direction but, all in all, it is a fascinating book.

Many of the volunteers volunteered years of their lives to the project and read many, many books sending in thousands of slips detailing word origin. The devotion to the project is truly impressive. Here is just one example.

The American who sent in the most slips was a clergyman in Ionia, Michigan, Job Pierson. A Presbyterian minister, book collector, and librarian, Pierson had the largest private library in Michigan (which included a book published in the earliest days of printing, from Vienna in 1476). Over eleven years, from 1879 to 1890, Pierson, who had studied at Williams College and attended Auburn Theological Seminary, sent in 43,055 slips from poetry, drama, and religion. His correspondence with Murray shows the breadth of his reading, from Chaucer (10,00 slips) to books on anatomy (5,000 slips), and lumbering (1,000 slips). A letter to Murray on 9 March 1882 conveys Pierson’s earnestness and the diversity of his reading for the Dictionary: ‘My dear Sir, I send you a small packet containing the A words from the part of Chaucer you lately sent me. Also, some lumber and railroad slips. I enclose a list of compounds of “saw” which I have lately collected. Also a cutting from one of our newspapers containing terms and phrases among the Brokers.’

Mixed in with the information about the Dictionary People is a lot of information about words and their first usage. Of course, I especially liked this quote about Jane Austen.

Austen’s letters and her novels were a great source of first quotations: she is the first person to write the words sponge cake, spoilt (as in a ‘spoilt child’), sprawly, chaperone, fragmented, irrepressible, doorbell, and noonshine (her own name for an afternoon snack – yes, it is in the OED).

I read this book over a few weeks reading a chapter or so at a time. It is a good book to dip in and out of. If you try to read it all at once it starts to run together. I do recommend it to anyone who loves words, language, and reading about people’s lives. My own family read the title and rolled their eyes. They said it was a very “me” book. Just wait until they see the next book I have. It is all about the development of the spelling of the English language.