Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press gave the New English Dictionary an institutional home and a route into print, turning a large historical lexicography project into a sequence of edited, typeset, and published fascicles. Its support enabled James Murray to work as editor, but its financial expectations and publication schedule also pressed upon the laborious process of defining words. The Dictionary’s material history—from slips and manuscript columns to printed volumes and discarded letterpress plates—shows how closely the Press’s publishing machinery was bound to the scholarship it issued.

Adoption and editorial responsibility

The Press’s Delegates agreed in April 1878 to proceed with the Dictionary after meeting Murray in Oxford. Contract negotiations continued for nearly another year, with disagreements over their terms, before a formal agreement was reached on 1 March 1879. Murray was to edit, on behalf of the Philological Society of London, the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. The projected work was estimated at about 7,000 quarto pages, in four volumes, and ten years of labor—a forecast that proved far too optimistic. The agreement marked the point at which an undertaking long discussed by the Society acquired a publishing commitment from Oxford University Press.

The Press’s adoption of the project also had practical consequences for its editor. Murray left his schoolteaching post and took up lexicography full time, despite low pay and long hours. The Press’s Delegates could be parsimonious and interfering, while the pace of editorial work seemed painfully slow and Murray’s health suffered. The project therefore depended on an institution that offered the means to publish it, but also expected visible progress and a return on its investment.

A publication schedule and the work behind it

Oxford University Press divided the Dictionary into fascicles, or instalments, both to bring the work out in parts and to generate revenue as it proceeded. The first fascicle appeared on 29 January 1884, almost five years after Murray’s appointment. Published by the Press in Oxford, it contained 352 pages covering English words from a to ant, in a muddy off-white cover with some of its sheets still uncut. Its title page presented the work as founded mainly on materials collected by the Philological Society and edited by Murray with assistance from scholars and men of science. The publication was a first tangible result of years of planning and editorial labor, even though the Dictionary remained far from complete.

The expected rate of publication exposed the distance between institutional timetable and scholarly difficulty. The hope was that two parts, amounting to 600 pages of finished Dictionary, could appear each year. Murray tried to complete work on thirty-three words per day, but a single word such as approve could take three-quarters of a day. For a difficult entry, editors might divide quotations into dozens of groups, provisionally define each, then repeatedly rearrange the evidence to reconstruct the development of meanings. The work on art, for example, had to be pulled apart and rebuilt after it had already been set in type. The Press’s schedule thus rested on a process that could resist prediction at the level of an individual word.

From quotation slips to printed pages

The publishing relationship operated through a material chain of contributions, editorial decisions, and production. Murray’s instructions asked readers to record a target word, the quotation’s date, author, book, volume and page, and the full sentence on a slip of paper. Once collected, such slips could be checked, alphabetized, sorted by parts of speech, ordered chronologically, and assessed for shifts in meaning. Murray then selected quotations, added etymology and pronunciation, and wrote the final definition before sending completed columns to the Press.

The Press returned these columns as galley proofs after setting them in type. The corrected material could then be made up into pages and forms for the letterpress machines in the stone printing works on Walton Street. This sequence connected volunteer reading and editorial judgment to the finished Dictionary: paper records were not merely a preliminary archive, but the working material from which entries were selected, arranged, and transmitted into print.

That system also gave a contributor in Broadmoor a direct route into the Dictionary’s production. When the editors sought further evidence for art, eighteen readers replied to an appeal prompted by Murray’s account of the difficulty of the entry. William Chester Minor sent twenty-seven quotations, many from Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses. His carefully sourced slips were valuable to the editors, and one quotation became the first known quotation he contributed to appear in the finished Dictionary. Later, when the Oxford team needed a word, it could write to Minor at Crowthorne; his indexes allowed him to search his collection and send citations suited to the editors’ immediate requirements. The Press’s editorial operation could therefore draw on work gathered far beyond its own offices.

The Press, its tools, and the Dictionary’s afterlife

The physical infrastructure of the Dictionary changed alongside its scale. After the first fascicle, Murray and his team worked in Oxford, where the Scriptorium was enlarged and its arrangements for receiving and sorting slips improved. More than a thousand quotations could arrive each day, requiring ordered processing before editors could use them. The institutional publishing project depended not just on a contract or a printing machine, but on sustained coordination between incoming evidence, editorial staff, and the stages of composition and proof.

Oxford University Press later moved away from letterpress production toward computer typesetting and photolithography. The metal plates used for printings of the Dictionary, from early fascicles to the twelve-volume edition of 1928, were discarded as the older methods were abandoned. A surviving plate could still be inked on a proof press to make new impressions, linking the Dictionary’s printed page to the metal form from which it had been produced. The contrast between those plates and newer processes records a transformation in the Press’s technology, as well as the obsolescence of the tools that had carried the Dictionary into print.

The Press also preserved institutional traces of the project and assisted later research into it. Its archives and staff helped the book’s author investigate Minor and the Dictionary’s history, and the Press has published an account of its own history that covers the making of the OED. The finished Oxford English Dictionary formally acknowledges Minor among its contributors. In this way, the Press’s role reaches beyond issuing volumes: its publication practices made the collaboration visible in print, while its records and surviving editions allow that labor to be studied afterward.