Trench's lecture on deficiencies in English dictionaries

Richard Chenevix Trench’s 1857 lecture on the deficiencies of English dictionaries supplied a new dictionary-making project with both its intellectual principles and its practical means. He urged the Philological Society to treat a dictionary not as an authority imposing correct usage, but as a historical record of the language, assembled from quotations and the work of many readers. The proposal began the undertaking that, after decades of delays and expansion, became the Oxford English Dictionary.

Setting and Occasion

The speech was delivered at a fortnightly meeting of the Philological Society in an upstairs room at the London Library on Thursday, 5 November 1857, Guy Fawkes’ Day. The Library had moved twelve years earlier from cramped quarters on Pall Mall; its new building had room to rent, and the Society was one of two groups selected to share it. Trench, then Dean of Westminster, spoke to an audience that included sixty members gathered at six o’clock. Darkness had fallen shortly after half past five. Outside, gas lamps sputtered, fireworks were beginning, and boys offered ragged effigies of Guy Fawkes for pennies. The members had come in from the noise and celebration to hear a lecture advertised as important but not especially taxing.

The talk’s title, “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries,” sounded restrained, but its implications were larger than a technical review. The Philological Society’s members broadly understood the spread of English as bound up with the spread of the British Empire and Christianity. In that setting, a defective dictionary could appear to threaten more than scholarly convenience: it might weaken a language regarded as an instrument of imperial and religious influence. Trench’s case for improving dictionaries therefore addressed both the Society’s practical concerns and its expansive sense of what English represented.

A Dictionary as a Record of Language

Trench identified seven principal deficiencies in existing dictionaries, most of them technical, but his central argument concerned the proper task of a lexicographer. A dictionary, he maintained, should be “an inventory of the language,” not a guide that separates approved words from disapproved ones. Earlier practitioners, including Samuel Johnson, had in his view acted as judges of usage. Trench instead described the lexicographer as “an historian… not a critic”: no individual, or even a body of authorities, should dictate which words people might use.

This principle made room for the language as it was actually lived. A dictionary should record words that had enjoyed a recognized life in standard English whether they were old or new, durable or short-lived, respectable or questionable. If a reader looked up a word and could not find it, the book failed in its basic purpose as a work of reference. The dictionary was not to certify a preferred version of English; it was to document the words that English speakers had made available to one another.

The record, moreover, needed to show change over time. Trench proposed that every word should have a history: evidence of when it first appeared in writing, followed by quotations showing how its meanings developed, shifted, acquired nuance, or fell away. Since the first spoken use of a word could not ordinarily be known, the first written evidence would provide a practical point of reference. Later examples would trace the word’s changing life. In Trench’s formulation, “A Dictionary” was “an historical monument,” through which a nation’s history could be viewed; even the wrong turns taken by a language could instruct as much as its accepted paths.

Quotations and Collective Work

The emphasis on documented word histories distinguished Trench’s proposal from earlier dictionaries that included quotations mainly to illustrate meanings. For the new undertaking, quotations would supply evidence not only of what a word meant but of how its meanings had changed. Building that record required reading literature on an enormous scale, as well as newspapers, magazines, and journals in London and New York. The task was so extensive that, by the conventional expectations of the time, it seemed almost impossible.

Trench’s answer was organizational as well as scholarly. The work could not be done by one person: it required “the combined action of many.” He envisaged hundreds of unpaid amateur readers, recruited as volunteers to examine texts and send in useful quotations. The audience murmured at the suggestion; the idea was unfamiliar, even though its democratic appeal was apparent to some members as the meeting broke up. Their labor would help produce a dictionary that did not rely on a single ruler of language. The method thus echoed the principle behind the scholarship: words belonged to a language in use, and evidence for their histories could be gathered from readers distributed across a wide community.

From Lecture to Dictionary Project

The speech at the London Library on Guy Fawkes’ Day 1857 is identified as the beginning of the Big Dictionary’s making. The proposal took years to become a working enterprise. On 26 April 1878, James Murray met the delegates at Oxford, and on 1 March 1879 an agreement appointed him editor of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Its original estimate—four volumes, about 7,000 pages, and ten years of work—proved far too small. The project ultimately took seventy years, almost to the day.

The organizational principle Trench had articulated also shaped the dictionary’s later practice. Within days of his appointment, Murray planned a Scriptorium and issued an appeal for volunteers in Great Britain, America, and the British colonies to read books that remained unexamined. A copy reached William Chester Minor at Broadmoor in the early 1880s. Minor developed indexed lists of words and quotations, enabling the editors to request evidence for particular entries; when the Oxford staff sought additional material for “art,” a response from Broadmoor supplied twenty-seven quotations. This later chain of reading, indexing, requests, and submitted slips gave concrete form to the lecture’s insistence that the dictionary depended on many contributors. Trench’s address was therefore not simply an argument about what a dictionary ought to contain: it helped define a method by which that record could be made.