Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical record of English built from evidence of how words were actually used: quotations document their meanings, spellings, pronunciations, and changes across time. Conceived in 1857 as a work more comprehensive than any earlier English dictionary, it grew far beyond its original schedule and projected size. Its twelve-volume first edition, completed in 1928, embodied the labor of editors and thousands of volunteers, among them William Chester Minor, who sent quotations from Broadmoor Asylum for nearly two decades.

A dictionary designed to record history

The project answered an ambition that earlier dictionaries, however learned, had not attempted to fulfill. In 1857, a formal proposal called for a new work broader than Samuel Johnson’s influential dictionary: not a selection of English, but an account of its words, shades of meaning, spelling, pronunciation, etymologies, and illustrative citations. Richard Chenevix Trench had argued for a new dictionary, and the undertaking that followed came to be known initially as the New English Dictionary. Its eventual name, the Oxford English Dictionary, became familiar after the first supplement appeared in 1933.

Its defining method was to collect quotations from published or otherwise recorded English and use them to demonstrate the history of each word and sense. Examples could show not only how a word had been used, but how its meaning, spelling, and pronunciation shifted, and when it entered the language. This made the work more than a repository of definitions: its evidence was arranged to disclose change. The method also imposed costs. Collecting, sorting, and selecting quotations took immense time, while English continued to evolve; the resulting dictionary was vast, expensive to produce, and in need of substantial supplements.

From proposal to publication

The scale of the project became clearer as it moved from aspiration to a publishing plan. After prolonged discussions, James Murray was appointed editor of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles on 1 March 1879, on behalf of the Philological Society. The contract estimated about 7,000 quarto pages in four volumes and a decade of work. Both the projected size and the timetable proved inadequate. Within days, Murray planned a corrugated-iron shed at Mill Hill School to serve as the Scriptorium and issued an appeal for volunteers to read books and extract quotations. The frontispiece reproduced in the book is the Call to the Contributors from an April 1879 pamphlet, by permission of Oxford University Press.

The first instalment offered tangible proof that the undertaking had begun to reach readers. Published on 29 January 1884, it contained 352 pages, covering the words from a to ant. Its off-white cover and uncut sheets marked the arrival of the first part of a work that had been in preparation for decades. Murray, facing a difficult and often dispiriting task, briefly expected the final part within eleven years. In fact, another forty-four years passed before the Dictionary was complete.

The editorial process matched the ambition of the result. Editors and assistants grouped quotation slips by word and sense, arranged the evidence chronologically to show changes in meaning, and refined the subdivisions. Murray supplied etymology and pronunciation, selected representative quotations—ideally examples from each century in which the word was used—and wrote the final definition. Completed columns went to the Press for typesetting; proofs returned to the Scriptorium before pages were prepared for printing. Even a single difficult word could absorb a substantial portion of a day, despite Murray’s effort to work through dozens daily.

Volunteers and William Chester Minor

The Dictionary’s scale depended on readers outside the editorial office. Murray’s 1879 appeal sought help across Britain, America, and the British colonies, extending volunteer work that had begun years earlier. Minor’s connection began through correspondence, probably in 1880 or 1881. Murray initially understood him to be a retired medical man with time to read; their exchanges concerned the Dictionary and its materials. When Minor’s address at Broadmoor, Crowthorne, led Murray to realize he was writing to someone in an asylum, their scholarly correspondence had already taken shape.

Minor’s contributions developed from collecting lists to sending quotations. The first slips described in the book began leaving the Broadmoor post-room in spring 1885, written in his neat American hand on small sheets of paper. By late summer, packets were arriving monthly and then weekly. The stream continued for almost twenty years. Minor’s work took place within a life constrained by his confinement and mental illness, but the Dictionary gave his scholarship a concrete destination: the quotations he gathered entered the editorial process alongside those supplied by other readers. The completed work would contain 1,827,306 illustrative quotations; Minor alone contributed tens of thousands.

The familiar story of Murray’s first visit to Minor requires qualification. A sensational account published by Hayden Church in 1915 imagined Murray arriving at Broadmoor unaware that his correspondent was an inmate. It circulated widely and became the basis for many later retellings. Murray’s own letter to Francis Brown presents a less theatrical history: he had corresponded with Minor for years before learning the nature of his address, and their first personal meeting took place in January 1891, not at the later date favored by the legend. The two men then met regularly for almost twenty years, their relationship grounded in mutual respect and a shared devotion to words. Correcting the story does not diminish Minor’s contribution; it locates that contribution within the slower reality of correspondence, reading, and sustained editorial work.

Completion and scale

The New English Dictionary was announced complete on New Year’s Eve, 1927, with the full text in the printers’ hands; the first edition was completed in 1928. It comprised twelve large volumes and defined 414,825 words. Its 1,827,306 quotations made visible the historical method that distinguished it from most dictionaries. The physical scale was equally striking: the typesetting extended to 178 miles, and the volumes together contained 227,779,589 letters and numbers, excluding spaces and punctuation. After the 1933 supplement, the title Oxford English Dictionary came into common use. Five supplements followed, and a later second edition integrated the first edition and the supplements into a twenty-volume whole.

These figures describe not only a large book but an accumulated system of evidence. The Dictionary’s authority rests on the relation between a definition and the recorded examples that support it: readers can see how a word’s uses developed rather than encounter only a fixed, timeless meaning. Yet the method exacted a long delay and required continuing revision as language changed. Its eventual form reflects both the strengths and the costs of historical lexicography: comprehensiveness achieved through patient labor, with no claim that the language had stopped moving.

Legacy and recognition

The Oxford English Dictionary became a landmark of scholarship and a record of collective work. Its first edition took more than seventy years to create, and its history extended across editors, publishers, readers, and changing plans. The book’s account of its making emphasizes that the result cannot be credited to a single office or scholar: the editorial architecture depended on a dispersed body of volunteers whose reading supplied the examples that gave the definitions historical depth.

Minor’s name remains among those contributors. The Dictionary formally acknowledges his work, and finding that name in its record connects a confined reader’s repeated labor to a work of extraordinary public scale. That recognition does not erase the circumstances of his life or turn the Dictionary into a remedy for them. It does show how the book could preserve an individual contribution within a vast collaborative enterprise. The finished volumes stand as both a guide to English and evidence of the many acts of reading through which its history was assembled.