The story of English Dictionary

The story of English Dictionary.

On my flight back last Saturday, after a cozy lunch served in the first class cabin, I settled down to read for God-knows how many’eth time the wonderful play of Shakespeare - “the Twelfth night”. I have a quite a strange affinity for Shakespearean drama. From my school days - when the very name of Shakespeare evoked immense disgust (because of its convoluted language, obscured imagery and bygone contexts) and the need to memorize huge tracts of painful orations - to the present time, when I almost love every written word ever penned by this great bard - the journey had been enriching and fruitful (to say the least), and like vatted wines, his dramas and sonnets have aged imperceptibly within me invoking a delectable taste in my literary buds, improving its sublimity and taste with each fresh reading and contemplation.

Shakespeare wrote most of his plays and sonnets between the years 1590 and 1613 - the most prolific, productive and to a large extent a defining period of English literature. And the curious thing about writing in English, when Shakespeare did, was the fact that there was no definitive lexicon of the language available. What this meant is that he had no way of checking the “meaning” of a word or its grammatical usage. For example, In the Twelfth night, Orsino sends a man in disguise as a woman to woo his lady love, and the reason Orsino gives his emissary for sending him on this adventure is this:

“(In you) all is semblative a woman's part….”

What he means here is that his messenger resembles a woman in more ways than one, hence his lady love is more likely to believe his words. There is no way in the world Shakespeare could have verified whether his usage of “semblative” was right semantically or even acceptable in written speech. All that he would have known is that it sounded phonetically right to a listener’s ears, therefore must be right; or, he would have consulted other books to validate his usage.

Believe it or not, English tongue did not have a formal dictionary of usage till 1755, when Samuel Johnson attempted for the first time to formally define the lexicon of the language. There were minor efforts that preceded him, but none encompassed all the ramifications and nuances that centuries of lingual fertilization had given birth to. The French have had their formal dictionary since 1600, the Italians prior to that, and so did the Germans; but English sadly lacked a formal body of organized words, till the gigantic mind of Dr Johnson put his life’s energy into compiling one. An ambitious man - Dr Johnson was - His goal was to “fix” English language for posterity, but six years into his enterprise, he realized the futility of his ambition and decided to narrow his vision to a manageable scale of last 150 years. Also, Johnson was more a classical writer in temperament than an assembler of words; hence, his dictionary made great reading on a sunny Sunday afternoon than as a reference to the language itself; His definitions were artistic expressions of a mind that thinks clearly and with beauty - but, to call his work acomplete lexicon of English would be far from the truth. And one cannot blame him for that: To compile nearly ten centuries of usage is simply not within the ken of a single individual’s possibility. The various pedigrees of the language, subtle variations of a word, onslaught of colloquial influences, liberal infusions from French, German, Italian and Latin - had swelled the quantum of words in use to a little more than unmanageable. Dr Johnson had only considered 150 years of Literature when he published his two volume “Dictionary of English language” – and it alone contained about 50,000 words with appropriate definitions and illustrations. It took him, a decade of solitary labor to scratch the surface of this rich and complex language. In terms of sheer scholarship, incisiveness, coverage and aesthetic beauty of his approach, there has been nothing that has surpassed the quality of Samuel Johnson’s work. It is a testimony of a single man’s love affair with a language that he adored, worshipped and disseminated so wisely.

Now I come to the meat of this essay. In 1857, On Guy Fawkes Day (for Indians, the year of Civil disobedience), an event was inaugurated in a secluded corner of the now famous London library, which was to have far reaching repercussions for the language. Richard Trench, a cleric by profession and a philologist by taste, spoke to an assemblage of like-minded people on a cold, blistery evening on the imperative need to have definitive dictionary of English. With English being adopted across the globe as a uniting lexicon, Trench was driven by this idea of giving that impetus a formal structure by laying down the lingua-franca of its speech and usage. In that brief one hour speech, Trench also unwittingly laid down some of the seminal principles of creating a corpus of the language, and emphasized to his spell bound audience that such an endeavor cannot be the undertaking of any single individual, but can only be made possible with the cooperation of hundreds, nay – thousands of educated volunteers, who will be encouraged to read certain periods of English literary history and contribute words and their respective definitions. Thus began the saga of OED (Oxford English dictionary) – a project that took nearly seventy years for its completion and publication; guided ably by editorial genius of Trench and Coleridge; followed by the mercurial Furnivall who gave it a definitive thrust; and then for forty odd years the able and methodical work of Sir James Murray to take the work to printer’s table. Literally thousands of Pamphlets were distributed soliciting volunteers, hundreds of house calls and seminars; friends spreading the world through social interactions - all of them found a resounding resonance in the English continent. Slips of paper with all kinds of words poured into the rickety shed that Murray had built to stack, study and typeset them into a standard format. The Postal service was inundated by responses for anonymous individuals whose only motive was to help build a dictionary for the language they loved and used. Such altruism though miraculous, was also possible in an age that was essentially preparing for war. It vindicates our faith in the Goodness of Humanity.

An important contributor to this great endeavor was an American Military doctor W C Minor, who was forcefully retired from the Army because of unstable mental condition. By a strange twist of destiny, he landed in mental asylum near London after having mercilessly shot an Irishman in broad daylight, assuming him to be his tormentor and persecutor. Dr Minor, though intellectually sound was ridden with bouts of depression and paranoia. Mid Eighteenth Century Science had not yet gotten their Freud, and all that doctors could do was to confine him to a fairly spacious set of rooms in Broadmoor, provide him with his painting brushes and paper, and more importantly – the love of his life - Books and more Books. History has not recorded how and when Minor got to know of Sir Murrays appeal to general public for their generous contribution of their time and words, but it is clear that he had made up his mind to make a significant contribution towards defining words for the Dictionary. Within the boundaries of his cell, he evolved his own way of reading and cataloguing words from his collection of books; and very soon, the office of Murray took cognizance of the fact that Dr Minor’s contribution was proving to be invaluable. Day after Day, Month and Month, his posts kept piling in and Murray’s men assiduously used his research to embellish their work.

The odd thing though was that no one knew Who Dr Minor was, or what he did for a living. All of them assumed that he was a man of wealth and leisure able to spend his time in furthering knowledge. It was only after twenty years of correspondence between Murray and Minor that they formally got introduced to each other; and the world came to know the mysterious mad man whose daily contributions meant so much to the making of dictionary. Finally, on January, the 29th 1884, nearly twenty seven years after the idea was first announced by Trench, the first volume of this massive work was published. It covered Words from “A” to “Ant”. It took another 30 years to announce to the world in 1927, the complete set of 12 volumes with over half a million words, hand bound and typeset on paper ( which would run into 178 miles in length). At an interval of every three years, on an average after that, a supplement was bought out incorporating new found words, and corrections and reinterpretation of existing definitions. In 1989, a fresh set of 20 volumes were published. It was the last time the Oxford would ever physically publish a dictionary; very soon they turned to digital media, which was definitely less expensive, easier to maintain and enhance.

As I was reading on the flight, all of sudden, I paused and felt so extremely grateful for the thousands of volunteers, editors, well-wishers ; without whose passion and commitment, the language of English may not have had a formal reference to it. After the OED, there have many other dictionaries that claim that title, but in my mind, there can be only one definitive guide, and that is the twenty volumes of OED. I would love to possess a complete set, but unfortunately they are not on sale any more. A couple of weeks ago, at the DeKalb library, I was leafing through a few volumes of their reference collection of the OED, and I chanced to look at the word “run”. There are six pages of listings for this simple word, and the number of meanings and definitions add up to 368. Each interpretation diligently catalogued and verbally illustrated. Strangely my eyes welled up with tears witnessing such human sagacity and commitment. I was proud of the Human race.

God bless…