Oxford English Dictionary

The latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of enormous lexicographical productivity, generating such diverse works as Roget’s Thesaurus in 1852, Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (six volumes, 1898–1905), John S. Farmer and W.E. Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present (seven volumes, 1890–1904), and Joseph Bosworth and T.N. Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898). The Oxford English Dictionary , or A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles or NED as it was originally titled, is rightly regarded as the ultimate monumental lexicographical achievement in semantic comprehensiveness and the historical reconstruction of the English language. The finished work, originally published in fascicles, or small volumes, from 1884 and 1928, comprised 414,825 headwords, about ten times the number in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary of 1755.

The enterprise started in 1842 under the aegis of the Philological Society, comprising such major talents as the first appointed editor, Herbert Coleridge, who died tragically at the age of 31, and his successor, Frederick Furnivall, who supervised the editing of early texts but resigned for reasons of ill health in 1878, having taken no part in the actual editing. However, the scholar who was the dominant force in the dictionary’s production was James Murray (1837–1915), so that for many years it was called “Murray’s dictionary.” Although he did not live to see the end of the alphabet in print, by the time he died (having reached turn-down ) he had written almost half of the 15,487 pages, a truly astonishing achievement.

Murray’s appointment as editor in 1879 might appear an unexpected choice, since he was an autodidact experienced at secondary school level, with only a conventional B.A. Pass degree from London University. However, he was awarded an Honorary LL.D. degree by St. Andrews University in 1874 for a number of advanced research projects. Long before the end of his life (in 1903) this modest and devout man wrote in terms typical of the faith and sense of duty of Victorian times: “I think it was God’s will. In times of faith, I am sure of it” (Murray 1977, 341). Murray was a genuine polymath, phenomenally learned in many fields apart from the obviously relevant areas of phonetics, dialects, etymology, semantics, grammar, and comparative philology. He had acquired a working knowledge of the main Indo-European languages and many others and was, above all, extraordinarily industrious and disciplined.

Important contributions to the early planning were two papers read to the Philological Society in November 1857 by Dean Richard Chenevix Trench on “Some Deficiencies of English Dictionaries.” In a major policy statement, Trench defined “the true idea of a dictionary” as being “an inventory of the language … all the words good or bad.” The lexicog-rapher was “an historian, not a critic” (cited in Morton 1994, 7). Considering the timing of Trench’s papers in the mid-Victorian era with its great emphasis on decency and decorum, this was a bold blow for inclusiveness. The original aim was to show the life history of every word, its origin, and any changes of form and meaning. Murray wrote in 1883: “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive .” (Mugglestone 2000, 10). But total inclusiveness proved difficult to achieve, both historically and in terms of lexical range.

Like Dr. Johnson before him, Murray wrote a magnificent Preface setting out with great clarity the huge problem of classification that lay ahead. Following Trench’s policy, Murray had to be “descriptive,” accepting what he called “that vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the Vocabulary of English-speaking men,” an entity he compared to a huge nebula of stars with a brilliant core surrounded by zones of decreasing brightness:

So the English Vocabulary contains a nucleus or central mass of many thousand words whose “Anglicity” is unquestioned; some of them only literary, some of them only colloquial, the great majority at once literary and colloquial—they are the Common Words of the language…. And there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference.

( OED , Vol. I, xvii)

Murray illustrated his model by means of a diagram to be found in the entry for register— that is, the diction appropriate for particular social situations or written contexts. In common with general perceptions of the structure of the vocabulary, the categories are arranged in vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical axis, which primarily concerns this study, shows the hierarchical arrangement of the categories of Literary > Common > Colloquial > Slang. The axis is a symbolic representation of the range from “proper” to “improper,” from “acceptable” to “problematic.” Naturally, Murray placed the category “Literary” above “Common”; today the status of “Literary” language is more problematic.

The enormous work was the collaboration of Murray preeminently, and three other major editors, Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions, “together with the assistance of many scholars and men of science.” (These four were extraordinarily learned, but in terms of modern notions of scholarship and qualifications, only Craigie would qualify.) In addition to the etymological data and the complexity of definition, the historical method required separating the senses and illustrating them, ideally by means of one quotation per century.

The progress through what Dr. Johnson had called “the treadmill of the alphabet” proved to be enormously arduous. When Murray was appointed editor he took over two tons of accumulated material. It took six years to produce the first fascicle, or part-volume, covering A—Ant . This appeared in 1884, twenty-six years after the initial proposal. So painfully slow was the delivery of copy that Murray became involved in many confrontations and much acrimonious correspondence with the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, he threatening to resign and they threatening to cease publication. Murray did not have the aggression of his predecessor Furnivall, who in an earlier dispute over money had challenged the delegates in un-Victorian language: “Why do you deal thus with us?… Why, because you have the capital or the command of it, why screw us?” (Murray 1977, 162). When Murray died in 1915, he had written the letters A-CD, H-CK, O, P, and T. Only Onions and Craigie survived to the end, in 1928, by which time the total number of head-words was 414,825. In terms of the original agreement with Oxford University Press, the dictionary was to take ten years and would consist of 6,400 pages in four volumes. In fact, it took forty-five years and needed twelve volumes to accommodate its 15,487 pages.

Generally speaking, the great work was remarkably thorough in including “all the words good or bad,” a quintessentially Victorian distinction unacceptable in modern descriptive linguistics. The usage note for bloody shows the strong contemporary awareness of decorum and class attitudes: “In general colloquial use from the Restoration ¹⁶⁶⁰ to c. 1750; now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word’, on a par with obscene and profane language.” (This entry was published in March 1887.)

When it came to the grossest “four-letter” words, there was the obstacle posed by the possibility of an action for “obscene libel.” As the entry for Farmer and Henley shows, Murray was not alone in the problematic area of what Dr. J.S. Farmer called “the Dark Continent of the World of Words.” The upshot was that Farmer, after having to sue his printers for breach of contract, included fuck, cunt, and condom , as well as an astonishing variety of compounds, but Murray did not. One voluntary reader, James Dixon, wrote a private letter to Murray saying that condom was “too utterly obscene” for inclusion (Murray 1977, 195). All these terms, however, had appeared in earlier dictionaries, such as Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), and had vigorous histories. In her biography of her grandfather, Elisabeth K.M. Murray claims that “James had really no choice but to leave them out of the Dictionary” (1977, 195). However, the Murray correspondence shows that his contemporaries were neither unanimous nor prudish: Robinson Ellis of Trinity College, Oxford took the view (shared by three colleagues) that “cunt’ also must in any case be inserted, as it is a thoroughly old word with a very ancient history” (undated letter in Elisabeth Murray’s possession). (Ellis was a noted classical scholar and editor of the Roman love poet Catullus.) Linda Mugglestone quotes a coy letter to Murray from one John Hamilton in 1899 (six years after the relevant fascicle had been published). It begins cautiously: “I venture to send you a word that is not found [in the dictionary]” and without ever using the word, alludes to it as having “the same syllable as a contraction of Contra .” Murray conceded in a reply a few days later: “It was not without regret that any word of historical standing was omitted”(2000, 10-11).

Only one contemporary review (in the National Observer , December 30, 1893) alluded to these omissions, accusing Murray of squeamishness and lack of courage, but the issue was not really raised until A.S.C. Ross reviewed the first Supplement in 1933: “it certainly seems regrettable that the perpetuation of a Victorian prudishness (inacceptable in philology beyond all other subjects) should have led to the omission of some of the commonest words in the English language: for example, cunt , ‘female sexual organs’; the curse , ‘menstrual period’; to fuck , ‘to have sexual intercourse with’; roger = fuck” (1934, Nr 3/4 9). However, no standard modern English dictionary included the words prior to the Penguin English Dictionary in 1965. When Volume I of the Supplement appeared in 1972, the editor, Robert Burchfield, commented archly in the Preface that “two ancient terms” had been restored, with full supporting evidence.

Although the OED may be criticized for these omissions, it nevertheless included an extraordinary range of coarse slang, including bugger, dildo, fart-catcher, licktwat, piss, shitsack, twat, windfucker , and many others of similar register, reflecting the robust quality of English over the centuries. The editors obtained examples of speech indirectly, scouring all manner of written sources with indefatigable industry, including letters, journals, and notebooks in their historical reconstruction of the lower registers. Often foreign dictionaries, such as John Florio’s Italian-English lexicon, A World of Words (1598), and Randle Cotgrave’s French-English dictionary (1611), proved to be surprisingly rich sources, being less governed by decorum.

Modern readers might find that the dictionary is Victorian or dated in its lack of sensitivity to racist or demeaning terms, whether general, like savage , or specific, like hottentot, nigger, coon , and wog . John Willinsky’s The Empire of Words (1994) has criticized the work, in the words of Jonathon Green, as being “overly middle-class, masculinist, chauvinist, imperialist and insulting to minority groups” (1996, 373). But these were times when Britain obviously had imperialist and colonialist attitudes toward other nations and races, when Joseph Conrad could publish The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) in a major literary journal without embarrassment or comment. Furthermore, it has become common to criticize dictionaries for recording the prejudices reflected in the speech community in words like Jew . In defining the terminology of many vexed political and religious issues the OED managed to steer a course remarkably free of bias.

When Murray died in 1915, the New English Dictionary was already something of a misnomer, yet still thirteen years from completion. But its reputation as the ultimate authority on the English language, renowned for meticulous scholarship, was secure. He had been accorded a knighthood in 1908, as well as some twenty honorary degrees and academic awards. The consolidated work in twelve volumes was styled The Oxford English Dictionary . An initial one-volume Supplement was published in 1933, followed by a substantial four-volume Supplement (1972–1986) edited by Dr. Robert Burchfield and his team, bringing the work as up to date as a historical dictionary can be. Since then the two corpuses have been integrated into the Second Edition (1989), and the consolidated work is available on CD-ROM. Oxford University Press issues regular Additional Volumes.