The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary Read Online Free PDF Page A

denominated ‘Polymaths’. 1897 O. Smeaton Smollett ii. 30 One of the last of the mighty Scots polymaths.
     
Philology (). [In Chaucer, ad. L. philologia ; in 17th c. prob. a. F. philologie , ad. L. philologia , a. Gr., abstr. sb. from  fond of speech, talkative; fond of discussion or argument; studious of words; fond of learning and literature, literary; f.  P HILO - +  word, speech, etc.]
1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning.

     
    It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstonesize volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary . This heroic, royally dedicated literary masterpiece—which was first called the New English Dictionary , but eventually became the Oxford ditto, and thenceforward was known familiarly by its initials as the OED —was completed in 1928; over the following years there were five supplements and then, half a century later, a second edition that integrated the first and all the subsequent supplementary volumes into one new twenty-volume whole. The book remains in all senses a truly monumental work—and with very little serious argument is still regarded as a paragon, the most definitive of all guides to the language that, for good or ill, has become the lingua franca of the civilized modern world.
    Just as English is a very large and complex language, so the OED is a very large and complex book. It defines well over half a million words. It contains scores of millions of characters, and, at least in its early versions, many miles of hand-set type. Its enormous—and enormously heavy—volumes are bound in dark blue cloth: Printers and designers and bookbinders worldwide see it as an apotheosis of their art, a handsome and elegant creation that looks and feels more than amply suited to its lexical thoroughness and accuracy.
    The OED ’s guiding principle, the one that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language. The reason behind this unusual and tremendously labor-intensive style of editing and compiling was both bold and simple: By gathering and publishing selected quotations, the dictionary could demonstrate the full range of characteristics of each and every word with a very great degree of precision. Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries; how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation; and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly when each word slipped into the language in the first place. No other means of dictionary compilation could do such a thing: Only by finding and showing examples could the full range of a word’s past possibilities be explored.
    The aims of those who began the project, back in the 1850s, were bold and laudable, but there were distinct commercial disadvantages to their methods: It took an immense amount of time to construct a dictionary on this basis, it was too time-consuming to keep up with the evolution of the language it sought to catalog, the work that finally resulted was uncommonly vast and needed to be kept updated with almost equally vast additions, and it remains to this day for all of these reasons a hugely expensive book both to produce and to buy.
    But withal it is widely accepted that the OED has a value far beyond its price; it remains in print, and it still sells well. It is the unrivaled cornerstone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection. And it is still cited as a matter of course—“the OED says”—in parliaments, courtrooms, schools, and lecture halls in