How was the Oxford English Dictionary made?

The Oxford English Dictionary was made by collecting evidence of how words were actually used. Volunteers around the world copied quotations onto small paper slips, and paid editors and assistants sorted them by date and meaning and wrote definitions from them. The first edition took from 1857 to 1928 to complete. [1] [2]

The project grew out of the Philological Society of London. In 1857 it appointed an Unregistered Words Committee to collect words missing from existing dictionaries such as Samuel Johnson's. The aim was at first a supplement, but within months the Society widened the plan to a fully comprehensive dictionary, formally adopted on 7 January 1858. It was to cover every word, trace its history, and illustrate changes of meaning with quotations. The volunteer model was inspired by the German dictionary of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, which had used 83 volunteers. [3] [4]

Readers combed books, journals and newspapers and wrote out examples of words in use on postcard-sized slips. Early on, the volunteers' job was only to supply this material. After James Murray became editor in 1879, he issued an appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading public, reproduced in magazines and newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet in Britain, the United States and the colonies. Over 800 people responded to the 1879 appeal. By 1884 the press reported 1,300 readers who had gathered 3,000,000 quotations, and by the end more than 6,000,000 slips had been contributed by volunteers. [4] [2]

Murray set up a sorting centre called the Scriptorium, an iron building with 1,029 pigeonholes, first at Mill Hill School and moved to Oxford in 1885. Slips were stored until editors were ready to work on a word. Assistants chose suitable quotations and put them in order, sorting chronologically so that the history of a word ran from its oldest known use to the most recent. Editors and senior assistants then wrote further slips for definitions and etymologies. The slips were numbered and sent to the printers. [1] [4] [2]

Volunteers also acted as sub-editors, arranging slips for a word and sometimes dividing them by meaning and drafting provisional definitions. A further tier, the re-subeditors, reviewed those drafts. The Preface to the first edition said that most sub-editors did far more than alphabetise, and that their work was of real value in the final editing. [4]

The team expected to reach Z in about ten years, but getting from A to ant alone took around that long. Work eventually took another six decades. Additional paid editors were appointed to work on different letters at once: Henry Bradley in 1888, William Craigie in 1901 and Charles Onions in 1914. When the dictionary was completed in 1928 it had 414,825 headwords and 1,827,306 quotations over 15,487 pages. Murray had died in 1915 and Bradley in 1923. Further slips were created for later supplements and the 1989 second edition. [2] [4] [1]