As claims that the OED is looking towards ceasing print publication of the ‘complete’ edition circulate (and are countered), I ruminate on the OED and dictionaries.
Anyone involved in writing by now will know by now there are claims that the next edition of the OED – The Oxford English Dictionary – may not appear in print form. Other reports suggest this is not a done deal as initial accounts in newspapers around the world say. Nevertheless, it’s a nice excuse to ponder on the OED and dictionaries.
It’s a colossus of the English language, with the second edition running to 20 weighty volumes. There’s even a guide to it and a word of the day RSS feed, which you can also view as a webpage. (‘to cross or pass the Rubicon’ is up today. Given how many words they have to chosen from it’ll be a long time before they double up…)
On my shelves is a copy of Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne. (I believe this now goes under the title The Professor and the Madman.) In it Winchester recounts how (paraphasing from the blurb on the rear cover) ’Dr. W. C. Minor, lascivious, charismatic, a millionaire American Civil War surgeon and homicidal lunatic, confined to Broadmoor Asylum, pursued his passion for words and and became one of the OED’s most valued contributors.’ It’s a short book (207 pages), but a great read. I have to admit I still haven’t gotten the account of this gentleman’s self-surgery out of my head. (I would give the spoiler, but it’s stunning.)
A later book, The Meaning of Everything, looks further into the history of the dictionary. (See the cover for a beard you’d rarely see today! The gentleman could step right into Lord of the Rings as a wizard.)
I have faint memories of an older edition of the ’full thing’ arrayed on the shelves of my college at Cambridge. While impressive, the volumes were so big and the writing so small as to make it unwieldy to use so rarely I did, preferring for most uses the more compact (and current) shorter versions.
