This is a fantastic repository of information about dominant late-19th-century culture and how it was thought that great writers created language. So when you investigate the quotation sources comparatively you can start to see that it tells you as much about the people making the dictionary as about the language itself. Obviously, what goes in determines what comes out. When you realise that the dictionary is based on its quotations, you start thinking: ‘Does that really reflect Shakespeare’s influence on the language?’ The second most-quoted person is Walter Scott – the most published author in the 19th century and incredibly popular among the educated upper and middle classes – exactly the sort of people who were searching out the quotations! Then you have the Bible, Milton, Dickens – no women in the top 12 or 15 most quoted authors, in fact no women at all until George Eliot with around 3,000 quotations. The largest single source was Shakespeare with around 33,300 quotations. You could begin to look at where the quotations in the OED came from. No, investigation of this sort has barely started – though it first started to be possible to scrutinise the work more analytically when the first edition and 20 th-century supplement were digitised in the late 1980s. Were there any immediate studies or analysis of changes in culture and society born out of the creation of the OED? That makes the dictionary a wonderful cultural as well as linguistic record – and it is still unmatched as a record of examples of written English and of historical lexical scholarship. And in fact, soon after it started appearing in successive printed instalments from the 1880s on, the OED became a symbol of the English-speaking people: their thoughts and feelings, passions and beliefs – not just the language in the abstract. The OED, as it was eventually named, wasn’t just a history of the language therefore but also a history of ‘English’ thoughts, history and lived experience over the course of the time that the language had been in existence and written down. Many of the quotations used as evidence of English usage through the ages were from the pearls of English literary culture – the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope etc – and the lexicographers drew on a variety of more specialised sources too, from every imaginable discipline (science, technology, business, art – from how to make a carriage to how to grow cabbages). It took many years for results to appear – the first edition wasn’t completed till 1928 – but eventually much of this material went into creating an enormous new dictionary of English, based on examples of real usage, which told the story of the English language from its early records onwards.Īn enormous new dictionary of English, based on examples of real usage, which told the story of the English language from its early records onwards. They had no resources themselves: they appealed to the public, put out leaflets in newspapers and journals and asked friends and acquaintances to join in, organising all these people to read through countless printed texts of every kind and send in quotations of how words had been used in English from 1150 to the present day. So they decided they would go about creating one. In 1859 a group of gentleman scholars, members of the London Philological Society (philological meaning ‘relating to the study of language’), got together and agreed that no satisfactory dictionaries of the English language were then in existence. Could you outline the history, production and people behind what became the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)?
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