Murray’s Directions to Readers for the Dictionary

Murray’s Directions to Readers for the Dictionary transformed volunteer reading into a disciplined method for documenting English usage. The instructions specified how to record quotations, what kinds of words to seek, and how to judge a useful example; their central principle was that evidence for ordinary words mattered as much as evidence for rare ones.

Recording a quotation

Each quotation was to be written on a half-sheet of paper. At the upper left, the reader placed the target word, or “catchword”; immediately below it went the quotation’s date, followed by the author and the cited book, volume, and page. The slip then carried the complete sentence containing the word. This arrangement linked an example to both its source and its date, making it evidence that could be sorted and assessed rather than an isolated extract. For books expected to be used frequently, readers could request pre-printed slips from Mill Hill. Otherwise they were to write out the slips in full, arrange them alphabetically, and send them to the Oxford University Press Scriptorium. The prescribed format made the individual reader’s work compatible with the Dictionary’s larger collection and editorial process.

What readers were to find

Murray’s rule was expansive: every word could be a catchword, and volunteers should try to find an illustrative quotation for each word in a book. They were encouraged to attend especially to words that were rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in an unusual way. But this emphasis did not restrict the task to unusual vocabulary. Ordinary words also required examples whenever a sentence showed something meaningful about their use. Dates were particularly important for words that seemed new, tentative, obsolete, or archaic. A dated quotation could help establish when a word entered the language. Murray also wanted more than one example where different contexts clarified distinctions in meaning or showed subtler variations in usage. The value of a slip lay not simply in the word it contained, but in what its context and date could demonstrate.

Correcting readers’ misunderstandings

The instructions had to counter a recurring misreading of the assignment: some volunteers thought they should search only for rare words. Murray also answered questions about whether every occurrence of words such as “the” required a quotation, and about what to do after reading a long volume without finding rare vocabulary. He explained that scores of examples for articles and prepositions were unnecessary unless something about their use was unusual, and repeatedly emphasized that readers must not disregard common words. An imbalance in the submissions made the problem concrete. Murray had received at least fifty quotations for “abusion,” meaning perversion of the truth, but only five for the much more common “abuse.” Editors consequently had to spend precious hours searching for examples of ordinary words that readers had overlooked. The contrast showed why rarity alone could not guide selection: an abundance of slips for an obscure word did not compensate for missing evidence about everyday usage.

The selection test

Murray condensed the instructions into a practical standard for judging an example: ‘This is a capital quotation for, say, heaven, or half, or hug, or handful; it illustrates the meaning or use of the word; it is a suitable instance for the Dictionary.’ A quotation qualified when its wording and context made it a particularly apt illustration, not merely because it happened to contain the target word. The Directions therefore joined broad collection with careful selection. Readers were to notice words across the vocabulary, preserve enough bibliographic and chronological detail to make each example useful, and choose sentences that demonstrated meaning or usage. Their test helped turn a mass of volunteer reading into evidence the editors could use in compiling the Oxford English Dictionary.