The Meaning Of Everything: The Story Of The Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester
When I was a kid, one of my many unflattering nicknames was dictionary boy, for my fondness for reading dictionaries in an attempt to learn new words and to better understand what they meant. This nickname was not meant as a compliment, and it expressed the general sort of hostility to the acquisition of knowledge that was present in the area where I grew up. As someone who still fondly reads and reviews dictionaries to this day [1], it is natural that I should be interested in the largest dictionary of the English language, the justly famous Oxford English Dictionary. And so it is that this book tells an institutional history and a bit of a biographical series of essays on the people who were most important in creating the Oxford English dictionary, a diverse cast of characters that includes British elite academicians and businessmen, an American hermit, an insane murderer, and J.R.R. Tolkien as the creator of words (like hobbit) and the student of other words (like walrus). And the story is an interesting and compelling one, to be sure, and one I greatly enjoyed reading.
This short volume of less than 250 pages begins with the usual acknowledgements and prologue and has eight chapters of main content. The author begins by looking at the measure of the English language and the history of attempts to define it (1). After that the author discusses the first attempts at making what was then called the New English Dictionary with the construction of pigeon-holes (2) for slips that contained words and their meaning, an effort which failed to grasp the magnitude of the task of defining every word in the English language. After that the author examines the problem of finding someone who would be able to helm the project to completion, which proved to be James Murray (3), the quarreling that went on between the various people involved in the project from Murray to the Oxford University establishment and the publisher who naturally wanted things published faster (4). The author discusses the initial reviews of the early volumes of the dictionary (5) and the difficulties faced in keeping the pace of publishing going through hundreds of thousands of words (6). Finally, the author concludes with chapters on some of the more odd helpers of the dictionary (7), the triumphant progress that eventually led to the completion of the project (8), and a discussion of the never-ending task of adding new words and definitions (epilogue).
There are a variety of factors that make English such a difficult language to define. For one, English has no formal institution that has the power to define English usage, which means that all efforts at defining English must be descriptivist, whatever prescriptionist tendencies some of us (myself included) have. For another, English has a rather voracious attitude when it comes to either coining new words to describe new thinking and behaving, new technology and cultural fads or in swallowing up suitable words from other languages, as well as taking words from various dialectal forms of the language. Suffice it to say that there seems to be little chance that the massive sprawl of the English language and the complex use of the language in various segments of the English speaking population will stop now. It is likely as well that if one looks at the interaction of English with other languages (like Spanish) and looks at the hybrid forms that are being developed, then many more words will enter the English language because of those cross-language interactions in the foreseeable future.
[1] See, for example:
Edge Induced Cohesion 