The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary is published - February 1st, 1884

On this day in 1884, the first section of the Oxford English Dictionary was published, covering the words “a” through “ant.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that flips through the pages of history to deliver
old news in a new way. I'm Gabelucier, and in
this episode we're talking about the origin of the OED,

(00:23):
a meticulous record of the English language and an unparalleled
achievement in publishing more than half a century in the making.
The day was February first, eighteen eighty four, the first
section of the Oxford English Dictionary was published, covering the

(00:47):
words A through ANT. It would take the editors another
forty four years to finish the rest of the volume,
but most language scholars, English majors, and word lovers would
agree it was worth the wait. Today, the Oxford English Dictionary,
or the OED, is considered the most comprehensive and accurate
English dictionary ever compiled. The current edition contains the meaning, pronunciation,

(01:12):
and history of six hundred thousand English words and phrases.
And if that weren't enough, it also features extensive cross
references to illustrate the different shades of meaning for each word.
There are more than three million quotations in total, representing
more than a thousand years of English literature. The seeds

(01:34):
of this ambitious project were planted in eighteen fifty seven
by members of the Philological Society of London, an elite
group of scholars dedicated to the study of language. Many
of the group's members felt that existing dictionaries weren't doing
justice to the English language. They contained only a fraction
of the words in use at the time, and even

(01:55):
then the entries were often riddled with errors. To make
matters worse, the dictionaries of the day didn't include any
information on obsolete or archaic words, the ones you'd be
most likely to look up if you came across them
in an old book. To solve this problem, the Society
proposed compiling a new English dictionary, one that would cover

(02:17):
the entirety of the English language from the Anglo Saxon
period to the present. The three members in charge of
the project were Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Fernival.
They were given no strict time frame for publication, but
it was clear from the start that the book wouldn't
be ready anytime soon. Unlike other dictionaries on the market,

(02:39):
this one aimed to provide a thorough chronological history for
every word and phrase, whether in current usage or not.
It also sought to contextualize that history by citing quotations
from a range of sources, including newspapers, classic literature magazines,
and even cookbooks. Collridge name the original editor, and he

(03:02):
realized fairly quickly that if they were to have any
hope of publishing in their lifetimes, they'd have to get
some outside help with sourcing all the necessary quotations. To
that end, he and Fernival assembled a large pool of
volunteer readers to pour over written texts from all periods
of English language history. The reader's goal was to extract

(03:24):
quotations that helped illustrate the usage of words, and then
mail them in on small pieces of paper, which the
team collectively referred to as slips. This system worked well enough,
but progress remained slow. Then, four years into the project,
Herbert Coleridge passed away and was succeeded as editor by Fernival.

(03:45):
This change in leadership proved detrimental, as Fernival was far
less organized than his predecessor. Thousands of quotation slips were
misplaced under his editorship, including all of the entries for
the letter H which somehow went up in Italy. Work
on the Dictionary continued off and on for the next

(04:05):
decade or so, but by the eighteen seventies did pretty
much ground to a halt. The project didn't get its
second wind until eighteen seventy nine, when the Oxford University
Press agreed to publish the book. Around the same time,
a new editor was appointed, James Murray, a self taught
scholar from the Scottish Lowlands and a respected member of

(04:26):
the Philological Society. As editor, Murray breathed new life into
the Dictionary's volunteer reading program. Amassing more than two thousand
readers from across the country. They mailed in thousands of
quotation slips every day, which Murray's small team would then
painstakingly review and organize. To better streamline this process, Murray

(04:49):
built what he called the Scriptorium. In reality, it was
just a sunken shed in his backyard for his staff
to work in, but it proved to be a game
changer for the project. It was made of corrugated iron
and contained more than a thousand pigeonholes in which the
ever growing horde of slips could be sorted, arranged and filed.

(05:09):
As time went on, Murray even employed his own children
at the scriptorium, paying them pocket money to help sort
slips alphabetically. Initially, Murray and his team estimated the dictionary
would take ten years to complete and would be contained
in just four volumes, but after five years on the job,
they weren't even finished with the a's, having only made

(05:31):
it as far as the word ant. Recognizing that the
completed book was going to take a lot longer than
they'd anticipated, the team decided to start publishing unbound editions
of the work in progress. The first of these fascicles,
or portions of a larger work, was published on February first,
eighteen eighty four. The official title was a New English

(05:55):
Dictionary on Historical Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected
by the Philological Society, but the four thousand or so
people who bought it just called it the New English Dictionary.
The first fascicle was three hundred and fifty two pages
long and cost twelve shillings and sixpence or about three

(06:15):
dollars and twenty five cents. American publishing the dictionary in
small chunks turned out to be the right approach, as
the full complete work wouldn't be ready until nineteen twenty eight,
forty four years after publication began in seventy one years
after the idea was first proposed. By that point, James

(06:36):
Murray had been dead for more than a decade, having
only survived long enough to complete work on the letter
t The project he once thought could be limited to
just four volumes, had ultimately ballooned into ten, containing over
two hundred and fifty thousand main entries and almost two
million quotations. Even at that enormous length, though there were

(06:58):
still some words and phrases that it had fallen by
the wayside a new vocabulary was being added to the
English language every day. With those oversights in mind, the
book was reprinted in nineteen thirty three as twelve volumes
plus a supplement. It was with this release that the
book took on its now familiar title, The Oxford English Dictionary.

(07:20):
That version of the OED remained in print for decades,
but in nineteen eighty nine it expanded again, this time
to twenty volumes. It was getting pretty cumbersome by that point,
claiming roughly as much shelf space as a set of encyclopedias,
so the decision was made to switch to a digital format.
It took more than one hundred and twenty typists and

(07:42):
fifty five proofreaders working for eighteen months to digitize the
entire contents, but from then on the OED could be
easily accessed electronically, first as a set of CD ROMs
and later on the Internet. Because the current OED only
exists in an electronic format, it can now be updated

(08:02):
every year to better reflect the evolving English language. In
twenty twenty three alone, more than seven hundred new words
were added, including modern signifiers such as air, frar, parasocial,
and super yacht. After all these years, the first word
in the OED is of course still a but the

(08:23):
back of the book has seen some reshuffling in recent years.
For a long time, the final word was zyntham, a
type of malted beverage consumed in ancient Egypt. But in
twenty seventeen, Zyntham was overthrown by Ziziva, a South American
weavil that feeds on palm leaves. That kind of shakeup

(08:44):
underscores the fact that compiling the OED was never going
to be the work of just one lifetime, Just like
the development of language itself. The project is and must
be forever ongoing. I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.

(09:07):
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Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for

(09:28):
producing the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see
you back here again soon for another day in History class.