We do not lack books about that magnificent edifice of Anglophone lexis, the Oxford English Dictionary. One can read K. M. E. Murray's Caught in the Web of Words (1977), a biography of her grandfather, James A. H. Murray, the first editor to see the OED into print and, while he was alive, its chief editor, as well as scholarly works written or edited by Lynda Mugglestone, Charlotte Brewer, and Sarah Ogilvie. Until now, however, we have had no reliable comprehensive history of the OED. With The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, however, Peter Gilliver has supplied that missing history. Gracefully written and occasionally wryly humorous, it achieves the highest standard of scholarship: it is an important book that is a pleasure to read.

Gilliver chronicles the OED from when it was just a glint in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's inward eye to the digital version developed from 1989 forward and currently under continual revision. On his way to the present, he passes through the Philological Society's influence on the project, preparation of materials under Frederick J. Furnivall, Murray's ascension as editor, negotiations with presses other than Oxford University Press, the politics of Oxford publishing, grappling with the scope of the dictionary and editorial method, the division of editorial leadership between Murray and Henry Bradley, then further among those two and William A. Craigie and C. T. Onions, eventual completion of the first edition and its supplement, the fallow period following publication of the first Supplement in 1933, R. W. Burchfield's editorship and preparation of the four-volume Supplement, digitization and integration of the Second Edition, and finally progress on the so-called Third Edition. This is a lot to cover in a mere 586 pages of narrative, but Gilliver does it thoroughly and neatly.

Gilliver knows the published literature of lexicography and its history well, and his insight into all aspects of dictionary-making is keen—he has been an associate editor of the OED for thirty years. His yet greater strength, however, is intelligent interpretation of several archives, most prominently those of the Oxford University Press. He does not focus all of his attention on the great figures but draws everyone from subeditors—whom we would just call “editors” nowadays—to pressmen into his account, thus demonstrating the complexities of the project and giving credit where it is due. Two of what he calls “interludes” among the official chapters are especially welcome: one that describes in detail the subeditors and subeditorial process while Furnivall was editor; the other aptly titled “Method: From Quotation Slip to Published Entry.”

Despite the book's excellence, overall and in its details, problems arise inevitably from the chronicle organization. For instance, we hear about “oversetting” repeatedly. Editors were supposed to adhere to a length of treatment at some agreed-upon proportional relationship, entry by entry, to Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language (1864); originally, the OED’s text was expected to be set at 5.5 times that of Webster's, and to exceed that expectation was to “overset.” We hear about oversetting so often because it was an editorial weakness throughout preparation of the first edition and all four editors were guilty of it, to various degrees. Readers should expect to hear of the trouble it caused annually from 1876 to 1933. Similarly, illnesses of various kinds dogged the project, and we hear about short-staffedness as a result of rest cures at many points in the narrative. One is tempted at times to raise one's fists to the sky and cry, “Not again!” but each instance of oversetting or illness is a fact relevant to the year in question, and the book's authority is founded on such detail.

The book is replete with detail. Gilliver may possess magical powers, because unlike just about any other author, he convinced the necessary people at the Oxford University Press that he should be allowed footnotes rather than endnotes. There are 1,956 of them, many of them archival references, but many others of them informative and often entertaining amplifications of the main narrative. These are supplemented by 46 figures, including photographs, roughly one every 12.5 pages, though some come in groups.

What Gilliver calls “capsules” are an unusual but appealing feature of the book—shaded notes, sometimes quite lengthy, explore matters of editorial policy and practice by examining in detail the lexicography of one word, blue, for instance, or Vaseline. All thirty-two of them are interesting in themselves, and Gilliver uses them to step back from the main narrative to view the problems described there on a different scale, from an editorial perspective rather than a historical one. Also, they allow a reader's mind to wander relevantly, providing momentary respite from the factually dense narrative.

The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary will stimulate many new approaches to the OED, but it will stand as the definitive biography of the project for a century, at least.