Like the Bible, the dictionary is a book of weighty authority, and the Oxford English Dictionary is the most weighty and authoritative of all. Conceived in 1857 and published in its first edition between 1884 and 1928, the OED comprised 15,488 pages, 50 million words overall, and two million illustrative quotations. Today, in its updated and uploaded form, the OED defines some 600,000 lemmas, tracing word-by-word the history of our enormous and ever-changing language.

As a masterpiece of imperial English culture, the OED has been the subject of extensive criticism and analysis. In Caught in the Web of Words (1977), James Murray's granddaughter recounted the sacrificial devotion of Murray in his 36 years as chief editor of the dictionary. In Empire of Words (1994), John Willinsky documented the Victorian bias toward great white men built into the dictionary. In The Professor and the Madman (1999), Simon Winchester told the story of the murderer in the insane asylum who contributed more than anyone knew to the making of the OED, and in The Meaning of Everything (2003), Winchester completed his story of the OED with anecdotes and personal portraits. Beyond these popular works, numerous scholarly articles and books have uncovered omissions, antedatings, and corrections to the dictionary.

So is there more "hidden history" to be revealed? According to Lynda Mugglestone, there certainly is. Behind the OED's authoritative text is a history of composition, complete with personalities, debates, and prejudices that shaped its first edition. How were definitions written? How were quotations selected for inclusion? How was spelling and pronunciation decided upon? Does the OED really trace the history of every English word that has ever existed? These questions are the subject of Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary. Mugglestone has closely examined the editing process of the OED in a way that has not been done before. By poring over a vast archive of annotated proof sheets, as well as letters, reviews, articles, and speeches, she has filled in many details about the editorial decisions that shaped the dictionary at the final stages of publication.

Mugglestone's research supports much of what we already know about James A. H. Murray. Like Samuel Johnson, he was "a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer." Murray dreamed of creating a fully descriptive, exhaustive, historical record of the language. With the impartiality of a scientist, he would document the story of every English word, whether low or high, old or new, common or esoteric. Such a biography of the language would be a "historical monument" fit for a great nation. But alas, as Mugglestone puts it, "The lexicon could not, in practice, be encompassed by the lexicographer." Although Murray wished to create an ideal dictionary, he was forced by budget constraints and cultural pressures to edit the text in more prescriptive directions.

The annotated proof sheets reveal that editing primarily meant cutting. Murray was constantly obligated to compromise his descriptive ideal, deleting quotations, definitions, and entire entries. Mugglestone discusses the rationale behind the deletions, confirming that literary language tended to be favored over vulgarisms, established vocabulary over neologisms. Thus quotations from daily newspapers were cut, while the wisdom of poets and bishops was kept. "Linguipotence" was retained because it was a coinage of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while "greyhoundy" was omitted, being used only in the popular journal Black and White. "Condom" was omitted without much question, while some of the most potent four-letter words were regretfully suppressed after lengthy debate. "Enthuse" was labeled "colloquial," and "gent" was censured as "vulgar." The editors made quite a few concessions to Victorian sensibilities.

Of course, with the second edition and the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary online, many of these omissions have since been corrected. The OED now features a complete history of every well-known taboo word in the English language, including a 281-word entry on "condom" with quotations beginning in 1706. A full range of Americanisms is covered, as well as world English from Australia, South Africa, Canada, and other Anglophone countries. Slang, too, is amply represented, from "awesome!" to "yo!", as are the most obscure technical terms, such as "algology" and "ampelography."

But even in its first edition, the OED ended up being more descriptive than its cultural milieu was accustomed to. For example, although the delegates of the Oxford University Press specified that the dictionary should avoid scientific terminology, Murray directed the dictionary's researchers and writers to embrace a wide variety of technical vocabulary. And although he received numerous complaints about the "incorrect" definitions of such words as "arcade" and "abhorrence," Murray declared, "I am not the editor of the English language," and he defined these and other words in accordance with the evidence before him. As Mugglestone summarizes it, "The fact that so many letter-writers … saw fit to complain about the undue liberality of the dictionary … serves as a useful index of the level of descriptive impartiality which the dictionary did indeed achieve." Her careful study of these hitherto unexamined letters and proofs shows exactly where Murray adhered to his principles and where he chose to compromise.

But how much of this "hidden history" needs to be revealed? For a devoted scholar of the OED, perhaps all of it. However, for the nonspecialist Lost for Words contains too much information. We are given far too many quotations from Murray and his correspondents debating details of spelling and usage, comments that might have been summarized in a few paragraphs with data presented in a table. We are given extensive dictionary definitions of "loss," "prune," and "adjust" as background for a discussion about the cutting of entries. And at times Mugglestone belabors the obvious, as when she spends several pages lamenting that the dictionary uses "man" where we in the 21st century would use "person."

It makes for painful reading, too, when Mugglestone takes on the jargon of a new-historicist literary critic, uncovering "cultural agendas" and "cultural codings" that are invariably "disturbing." In one of her most impenetrable sentences, she states, "If such socially constructed edicts are in keeping with a self-styled manual on 'good' usage, then they can seem disconcertingly normative when they appear within the intentionally objective domain of the OED in which empiricism rather than language attitudes—particularly those based on convictions of one's place in the social order—had been given categorical pre-eminence." In other words, although Murray claimed to be fully objective, he was influenced by his culture and values. Why does Mugglestone need to make simple things complicated?

For this book makes essentially a simple argument: in spite of heroic efforts on the part of James Murray, the OED was to some extent shaped by social preferences in favor of high culture. This is not a new argument, but what is new is Mugglestone's examination of the proof sheets and other contemporary documents, which lend support to this well-established understanding of the development of the OED. It is unfortunate that this point is obscured by superfluous detail and an excessively analytical style.

If you want to know about the short life of "lustricity" or the comparative advantages of "rhyme" and "rime" or the lexicographical debates over the correct usage of "avocation"; how "fray" came to lose its "obsolete" label or how "okonite" was derived from "ok," then Lost for Words will provide informative reading. On the other hand, if you want to hear the story of the making of the OED, stick with the books of Elisabeth Murray and Simon Winchester.

Andrea R. Nagy has been a project editor for the New Oxford American Dictionary, a citation reader for the Oxford English Dictionary, and the author of scholarly articles on the history of English dictionaries.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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