In the fall of 2014, Sarah Ogilvie spent a few days bidding farewell to Oxford University before setting off for a new job in the United States. Near the end of that nostalgic goodbye, she revisited the basement of the Oxford University Press and, in particular, an obscure corner where the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are stored. Among her other professional positions, she had worked as an editor for the OED and had many fond memories of the days she’d spent in the building.
In the basement, she pulled a random box from a shelf, placed it on the floor, lifted the lid, and found a black book that would change the direction of her life. “When I opened it,“ she later wrote, ”the first thing that struck [her] was the immaculate cursive handwriting. I recognized it as the familiar hand of James Murray.”
In this address book and several others subsequently discovered by Ms. Ogilvie, James Murray, editor of the original OED, had recorded the names and addresses of over 3,000 volunteers who had contributed words and quotations to the OED, drawing them primarily from books they’d read. In 1879, Murray had advertised for such help in periodicals and newspapers, and men and women from around the world had responded to his call, but the identities and life circumstances of most of them were long deemed lost.
From this extraordinary trove of information, and after nearly a decade of intensive research, Ms. Ogilvie has now presented us with a great gift, “The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.”
The Ultimate Word Search
Simon Winchester’s 2005 bestseller, “The Professor and the Madman,” tells the story of one of these contributors to the OED, Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor. The doctor submitted more than 10,000 words to James Murray’s project, but he was also, as Murray eventually discovered, an inmate in an asylum for the insane.
In “The Dictionary People,” we learn that Dr. Minor was only one unusual volunteer among many of the academics, writers, and ordinary citizens who joined Murray’s legion of correspondents. Ms. Ogilvie has taken the most interesting of these contributor and sorted them by alphabetical headings, as in “A for Archaeologist,” “O for Outsiders,” “U for USA,” and so on.
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Some of these people who read books and searched for unusual words were beyond eccentric. Several were like Dr. Minor, people suffering severe mental problems who were in and out of asylums. In fact, the top four contributors, at one point or another, suffered from mental illness or were confined to what were then called “lunatic asylums,” suggesting, Ms. Ogilvie writes, “a connection between obsession and madness.” At least three contributors were murderers, others fall into the category “V for Vicars (and Vegetarians),” and one of her groups consists of novelists.
2 Samples From the Ogilvie Alphabet
In her chapter “B for Best Contributor,” Ms. Ogilvie describes tracking down Thomas Austin, who over a 10-year period submitted a total of 165,061 slips containing words and quotations. During her search for Austin’s history, she also discovered that as his slip count grew, he came to believe that he should be a paid employee of the OED project and reacted with rage when Murray deemed him a Reader and, as such, a volunteer. Though Murray couldn’t pay these volunteers, Ms. Ogilvie does note of the impoverished Austin that “the Dictionary would not be the esteemed volume that it is today without his extraordinary contribution.” Austin finally found employment with the Early English Text Society, where he edited a work containing two 15th-century cookbooks.
In “F for Families,” we learn that a good number of families jointly undertook this mission of word-searching during their reading, enthusiastically writing out slips and mailing them off to Murray and his team. Ms. Ogilvie names more than 25 of these families, most of them located in England, but her list also includes the Ruthvens of New Zealand and the Fosters of New Hampshire.
It is in this chapter that we also come to know more about James Murray, his wife Ada, and their 11 children, all of whom took a hand in creating the OED. A teetotaler and a believer in routine—the household operated on a schedule dictated by bells—Murray nonetheless possessed a great sense of humor and enjoyed games with the children. Ms. Ogilvie writes, that the Dictionary often “created a tension that he could never resolve” between the demands of that work and his desire to spend time with his family. Near the end of his life, he lamented in a letter to one of his sons, “The greatest sacrifice the Dictionary entailed upon me, by far, was the sacrifice of the constant companionship of my own children.”
An Added Bonus
In addition to identifying hundreds of these lost correspondents, Ms. Ogilvie also resurrects the age in which they lived.
In “A for Archaeologist,” for example, Ms. Ogilvie selects Margaret Murray—no relation to James—as the appropriate Reader to begin this parade of correspondents. Margaret Murray was an unusual woman who, by force of will and training, eventually became one of the outstanding archaeologists of her day. At 18 years old, she was among the first to participate in the gathering of words and quotes for the dictionary.
She lived in Calcutta at the time, and in just a few paragraphs, Ms. Ogilvie re-creates British life in imperial India. Murray rose with the sun to enjoy the cool mornings and often went to the rooftop of her home to read and gather words. Around her, Ms. Ogilvie writes, were the scents of Indian foods being cooked and the rising clamor from the street as the city woke to greet another day. On one occasion, this reading became impossible when a massive swarm of green, black-spotted beetles struck the city and invaded the Murray family’s home, getting into her hair and crawling into her clothing. In addition to submitting words from her books and from Indian terms she picked up from household servants, the young Murray also worked for a time as a nurse and, according to Ogilvie, helped “save hundreds of lives during a cholera epidemic.”
Such background information supplied by Ms. Ogilvie gives us many other insights into daily life during the last half of the 19th century. In “M for Murderers,” an early pioneer of motion pictures, Eadweard Muybridge, moved from England to America in the 1850s, first to New York and then to San Francisco. Due to a head injury suffered during a stagecoach accident, Muybridge suffered for the rest of his life from outbursts of violent behavior, a condition that may have contributed to the murder of his much-younger wife’s lover. Through him, again in just a few paragraphs, Ms. Ogilvie gives us the rough-and-tumble chaos of the California mining camps, glimpses of the vibrant entrepreneurial spirit common in that time, and the workings of the legal system, which found Muybridge not guilty of murder by reason of passion and temporary insanity.
We also become aware of the great influence that amateurs and hobbyists had on the dictionary. British Victorians founded countless societies and clubs, which served as meeting places—Ms. Ogilvie compares them to today’s social media—“for gossip, news, and discussion.” A good number of these clubs focused on local history, and amateur philologists sent Murray their findings by the thousands. We see, too, how so many of these people were prolific correspondents in general, often daily posting a half-dozen letters or more.
‘Z for Zealots’
In this last chapter of “The Dictionary People,” Ms. Ogilvie returns our attention to James Murray. Though he had hoped to finish the entire project before his death, he was working on the T’s when he fell ill at age 78 and died of pleurisy. Significantly, the last word under his consideration was “twilight.”When we consider that Murray himself was never a professor at Oxford, relegated by snobbery to the status of more “town” than “gown,” and often felt himself an outsider, his zeal to bring the Dictionary to life is all the more remarkable. He operated on an interior idealism sustained, as Ms. Ogilvie tells us, by three main things: “his God, his family, and the Dictionary People. ‘God give me the help to do my work,’ was a prayer he often repeated.”
In 1928, that work finally found fruition in the publication of the Dictionary: ten volumes, 414,825 entries, and 1,827,306 quotations.
Readers who are lovers of words, or who are looking for a grand tour of the human spirit, or who simply want the pleasure of a great story, will find these desires satisfied in “The Dictionary People.”
‘The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary’
by Sarah Ogilvie
Knopf, Oct. 17, 2023
Hardcover, 384 pages
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