The stories behind the Oxford English Dictionary

IN JULY 1915 an ailing James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had dedicated 36 years to the dictionary; his toil had taken a toll. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.

The poetic pathos of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable tales in “The Dictionary People”. Conceived in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project—“the Wikipedia of the 19th century”—comprising 3,000 people. The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time (unlike its “prescriptive” 18th-century predecessor by Samuel Johnson, which told readers how to say and use words).

Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar” words were used. What is surprising about this fairly random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.