Eating and clothing have become entry points for cultural history, and now the past is illuminated by so unlikely a subject as the making of dictionaries. Two recent popular books by Stephen Winchester have fed the appetites of those hungering to know more about lexicography, and now comes Lynda Mugglestone to provide a more nourishing feast for the scholarly public.Footnote ¹ As editor of a multiply authored volume (Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]), she has entered the world of the dictionary deeply informed about how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was made.

Mugglestone's most important sources lie in the archives of the dictionary, the Murray papers (acquired from the late biographer of her grandfather, Elisabeth Murray), and, above all, from the successive states of the proofs of the dictionary (see K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the “Oxford English Dictionary” [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977]). James Murray and his successors used typographers with as much indifference to their well-being as a modern scholar might display for the happiness of the copier or the melancholy of the fax. Entries and evidence assembled by subeditors were put in type, and only then did the editors begin their work in earnest. Full sheets of paper provided ample margins for insertions (particularly with Murray's tiny handwriting), but, when space in the margins was filled, additional slips could be pinned to the side and folded back so the whole sheet could go back to the press where it would be flattened again and typographers could resume the endless revise. (These remarkable proofs are represented in the dust jacket, but not in the volume itself; since most libraries will discard the jacket, many readers will never see them.)

Close inspection of these proofs reveals the words that were removed from the dictionary even after being given the full editorial treatment. Examples from usage, particularly but not always those from newspapers, might disappear in the desperate attempt to limit the vast bulk of the work. The conflicting demands of science (requiring all words to be noticed) and of art (illustrating only the best words and the best authorities for their usage) have been studied in the prior scholarship but never before this book with such excellent particularity. Far from having “the meaning of everything,” the dictionary shed information constantly. While users have understood that a few words were deliberately (like “condom”) or accidentally (like “bondmaid”) passed over, Mugglestone shows that “thousands of other words vanished for ever [sic] from the published fascicles” (79). Some of these disappeared because they were taboo, but far more because they lacked a “pedigree” among good writers. Pruning sometimes produced unfortunate results. Henry Bradley edited an entry for “landscaping,” with citations back to 1822, and then deleted it. Because the late R. W. Burchfield only traced unregistered words to 1884 in his Supplement (R. W. Burchfield, “Introduction,” in A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], 1:xii–xvii, xiv), the pedigree of “landscaping” did not emerge until Mugglestone's inspection of Bradley's proofs brought the full historical development clearly to light.

As Mugglestone notes, Murray brought to lexicography “a new language of inclusiveness” (122), but she rightly points out that inclusion did not mean approval. Quoting an unpublished letter of 1911, Mugglestone records Murray's statement: “I am not the editor of the English language” (144). She might easily have quoted the very public rebuke directed at Murray in 1892 when an eminent Oxford scholar, whom Murray had criticized for the “abuse” of a word, had written: “He is not the editor of the English language” (quoted by Richard W. Bailey, “‘This Unique and Peerless Specimen’: The Reputation of the OED,” in Mugglestone, Lexicography and the OED, 221). In some ways, Murray and his successors were at war with usage, despite their much vaunted allegiance to dispassionate description. In the definitions of the OED, the abbreviation erron. appears 1,683 times, and other marks of opprobrium are frequently encountered: “mistake” (361), “misuse” (240), “misapprehension” (47), “misapplied” (37), and “catachrestic” (13).

Mugglestone's careful archival research provides by far the best insight to date into the operations, enthusiasms, and prejudices of the editors of the OED. What is remarkable is that these four men were given unprecedented authority over the English language, and all of them emerged from humble backgrounds. Murray was the son of a village tailor, Henry Bradley of a fire-clay agent, William Craigie of a gardener, and C. T. Onions of a metal embosser. They were among the geniuses to dominate Victorian intellectual life, akin to the scientist Michael Faraday (who had apprenticed as a bookbinder) and Joseph Wright, the compiler of the English Dialect Dictionary, who had begun his working life as a donkey-boy in a quarry. “Meritocracy” is a term that was not in use until 1958, according to the OED. Clearly it was a term needed much earlier.