The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

What an excellent title!

The meaning of Everything is an account of the compilation of a truly great piece of work: the Oxford English Dictionary, from its inception in 1858 to its completion in 1928; a fascinating account of how such an extraordinarily difficult and ambitious task was accomplished and something about the men and women who collaborated on it.

The first great task was to decide the parameters of the work. Words of every era were to be included, through Chaucer’s Middle English and Shakespeare’s Early Modern English through the consequent proliferation of words to the present day. Not only was a definition to be given of all the words in the English language, but a history of that word, with quotations, to show different shades of meaning changing over periods of time.

How to find readers to contribute all the quotations needed for comparison by the editors and sub-editors? Furnivall, the keen but disorganised first editor, successfully enlisted volunteers between flirtations with young women and teaching them to scull on the Tideway. A rowing club is named after him.
The worthy gentlemen and ladies who volunteered were assigned books, or whole authors to read, and responded with bundles and bundles of slips, containing headword, quotation and reference.

When James Murray took over the editorship from Furnivall he was passed an enormous pile of slips that Furnivall had stacked in his hallway. Unfortunately Furnivall had lost a great many more. Murray found a dead rat in one sack of slips, and a live mouse with her family in another. Furnivall had lost his address book, so he had lost track of many sub-editors, some of whom had died or moved, leaving behind piles of slips.

“The letter H was missing in its entirety, as was the slightly less important Q and Pa. The slips for G were very nearly burned with the household rubbish when one Mrs Wilkes turned out the house in the wake of her husband’s death."

James Murray worked on the OED for 35 years.

At first he worked in Primrose Hill, and caused a scriptorium (office containing all the slips in pigeon holes) to be built in his garden. Eventually he needed to move to Oxford, where another scriptorium was built, also in his garden, of corrugated iron, slightly buried to hide it from the neighbours. Murray saw a great deal more research was needed. He sent out an appeal for more volunteers to fill the gaps in the reading and especially, instances of “ordinary” words. At the peak of their labours, 1,000 slips were arriving at the scriptorium every day.

Murray wore a long white beard, and in spite of the stresses of his job, a serene and amused expression in his eyes. He and his wife Ada had eleven very intelligent and successful children, all of whom worked in the scriptorium for their pocket money. Murray was particularly kind to one of his contributors, an American doctor whom he discovered to be an inmate of Broadmoor mental hospital - he had murdered a London workman during a schizophrenic attack.

Murray died of cancer of the prostate in 1915, and the work was completed in the same style as the one he had set out.

The story of the dictionary is a very interesting one. These are some of the highlights, but the entire book is a delight to read, being very well-written. It is a remarkable book.

Actually I read this book 6 years ago, and I am at present reading its predecessor, the Surgeon of Crowthorne, which enlarges on the contribution made by Dr W Minor, of Broadmoor. Poor man -  he was tortured by his own mind - his nightly terrors caused him to commit his crime, and he might never have lost his sanity if he had not been a doctor in the American civil war.

In his old age, his sexual nightmares beyond endurance, he cut off his penis. It seemed like a remedy, but sadly although interestingly, the fantasies continued to torture him just as much.