Publication of the first OED fascicle

Publication of the first OED fascicle on 29 January 1884 turned an immense, long-delayed dictionary project into a printed object that readers could inspect. The 352-page installment, covering the words from a to ant, revealed the undertaking’s intricate historical method; its arrival also briefly revived James Murray’s confidence, even as the decades still required to finish the work lay beyond his prediction.

Background and Publication

The fascicle appeared nearly five years after James Murray’s appointment as editor and twenty-seven years after Richard Chenevix Trench’s address calling for a new English dictionary. The project had been divided into revenue-producing installments, and its first part was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, on 29 January 1884. For Murray, who had endured slow progress, difficult relations with the Press’s delegates, poor pay, long hours, and deteriorating health, the publication marked a substantial change: the dictionary was no longer only an enormous plan and a mass of collected material, but a book available to readers.

The First Installment in Print

The first fascicle comprised 352 pages and covered the known English words from a to ant. Its full title identified it as the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society, edited by James A. H. Murray with the assistance of many scholars and men of science. The physical volume, with its muddy off-white cover and half-uncut sheets, made the work’s scale and fine-grained design visible. Its opening entries demonstrated the historical reach of the method: after four pages devoted to the letter A, the first word was the obsolete noun aa, supported by a 1430 citation; the first properly current word was aal, a name for a dye-producing plant, documented by an 1839 reference.

Readers, Price, and Reach

The installment was offered in England for twelve shillings and sixpence. Readers in the United States could obtain the Oxford-printed fascicle through Macmillan in New York for three dollars and twenty-five cents. The publication thus carried the dictionary beyond its editors and contributors: readers could encounter not simply a list of definitions but a densely documented record of words, dates, and uses. The first pages gave a concrete glimpse of the editorial exactitude on which the larger work depended.

Murray’s Forecast and the Long Completion

Holding the fragile first volume in his hand eased, for a time, the pressure of the project’s difficulties. Less than a week before his forty-seventh birthday, Murray felt confident enough to predict that the final part would appear in eleven years. The prediction registered the exhilaration of seeing the work take printed form, but the book’s eventual history sharply undercut that optimism: completion would take another forty-four years. The first fascicle was therefore both a major achievement and an early measure of the distance still to be travelled.