Herbert Coleridge

Herbert Coleridge was the first editor of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, the ambitious undertaking that became the Oxford English Dictionary. His brief editorship began with the practical problem of how to contain and sort a dictionary’s worth of evidence; his early death left that work unfinished and exposed how greatly the project’s scale had been underestimated.

Identity and Editorial Appointment

The Philological Society had initially considered compiling a supplement of words missing from existing dictionaries. As searches uncovered far more material than such a supplement could contain, it adopted the plan for a wholly new dictionary on 7 January 1858. Coleridge became its first editor. The undertaking was still only an idea in need of a workable method, and its eventual progress remained slow: twenty-two years of sporadic activity followed before the dictionary truly got off the ground.

Designing a System for Evidence

Coleridge’s first task was organizational. He designed a stack of oak-board pigeon-holes, nine holes across and six high, to hold the quotation slips expected from volunteer readers. Each slip recorded a target word, bibliographical details, and a sentence illustrating the word’s use. Coleridge anticipated between 60,000 and 100,000 slips, and estimated that the first volume could be ready within two years. The scale of the planned filing system gave physical form to the Society’s historical method: words would be understood through dated examples of their changing use.

The estimates proved far too optimistic. Volunteers ultimately supplied more than six million slips, while the first saleable section took ten times as long as Coleridge had predicted. The dictionary was to appear in parts to keep revenue coming in, but the volume of evidence and the time and money required to process it had been badly misjudged. Coleridge’s pigeon-holes were an early response to a problem whose eventual magnitude the project’s organizers could not yet see.

Death and Unfinished Work

Coleridge worked on the dictionary for only two years. He died at thirty-one before reaching halfway through the quotations for words beginning with A. On his way to a Philological Society lecture, he was caught in the rain; he stayed through the lecture in an unheated upstairs room at St James's Square, caught a chill, and died. His last recorded words conveyed an intention to begin Sanskrit the following day, a small, practical promise made at the edge of an abruptly ended life.

Legacy in the Dictionary’s History

After Coleridge’s death, Frederick Furnivall took over and developed the use of assistants to check and sort incoming slips before editors selected quotations for individual words. The system Coleridge had begun to design belonged to a collective enterprise that outlasted its first editor by decades. His brief tenure therefore marks both the project’s first concrete editorial labor and the distance between its initial forecasts and the immense undertaking it became.