Oxford English Dictionary Published: Defining Language

Twenty-seven years of work produced a single volume covering the letters A through Ant. The first fascicle of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary was published on February 1, 1884, and it was already running decades behind schedule. The Philological Society of London had proposed the project in 1857, estimating it would take ten years and fill four volumes. The finished dictionary would not appear for another forty-four years. The original editor, Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, died of tuberculosis in 1861 at age thirty. His successor, Frederick Furnivall, was brilliant but chaotic, spending more energy founding rowing clubs and feuding with colleagues than organizing the thousands of quotation slips volunteers were sending in. By 1879, the project had no published pages and boxes of unsorted material were scattered across England. James Murray, a self-taught Scottish lexicographer, took over in 1879 and built a corrugated iron shed called the Scriptorium in his Oxford garden to house the work. Volunteers worldwide, called "readers," sent in quotations illustrating how English words had been used throughout history. One of the most prolific contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor, turned out to be a convicted murderer confined to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, sending in thousands of entries from his cell. Murray worked on the dictionary until his death in 1915, having reached the letter T. The complete first edition was published in 1928 in ten volumes containing 414,825 entries. It remains the most comprehensive historical record of the English language ever assembled. The OED proved that a language cannot be pinned down by any single generation. It can only be documented mid-flight.