In 1900, just 5 percent of married women held down a paid job.

Most of these enthusiasts were idealists who wanted to create auniversal language which would help international relations and unite theworld. This noble hope stood in contrast with – and probably in reaction to –the rise of nationalisms in the late nineteenth century. Over 150 newlanguages were created in this period, the best-known being Volapük (1879),Pasilingua (1885), Esperanto (originally called Lingvo Internacia) (1887),Spelin (1888), Spokil (1889), Mundolingue (1889), and Ido (1907).

Francis March was a Professor of English Language and ComparativePhilology at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The study of Englishin higher education was a development of the nineteenth century, and it tooka long time for English studies to gain recognition. March’s appointment as aProfessor of English in 1857 had been the first in the world that had theprestige of a full professorship – Rutgers appointed its first English professorin 1860, Harvard in 1876, and Oxford in 1885.

informal hub was the Sunday Tramps, a group of intellectualmen brought together by Leslie Stephen every fortnight, regardless of theweather, to hike together in the countryside on the outskirts of London. Theword tramp was a popular colloquial term at the time for ‘a walkingexcursion’.

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two Readers who wereaunt and niece and also lesbian lovers.

Ashbee was also quite possibly the anonymous author of an infamouspublication, My Secret Life, a narrative (likely fictitious, albeit based on theauthor’s experiences) of the 1,500 sexual exploits of a man called ‘Walter’who frequented the bars and brothels of London in the 1880s. The memoirwas in excess of a million words, coming in at 4,000 pages, over elevenvolumes. Only six copies exist today of the original print run of 475, self-published for private subscribers, but it was reprinted in the 1960s and hassince grown in reputation and fame. Its author is still unidentified, but Ashbeeis the frontrunner. Given the words sent in to the Dictionary by Ashbee, itwould not be surprising if he authored a book with chapter headings such as‘My Cock’, ‘A Frisky Governess’, and ‘My Cousin’s Cunts’ (the plural ismind-boggling!). It was only very recently, in the twenty-first century, thatMy Secret Life was read for the OED and the editors discovered that itcontained the first written evidence for the words cocksucking, cunty, fist-fuck(originally meaning masturbation), frig, fuckee, and randiness.

There were two approaches to the treatment of patients in psychiatrichospitals at the time: a humane consideration for their well-being and possiblerecovery, or the opposite – an inhumane disregard for their personhood andpossible recovery. These different approaches were championed by twoDictionary volunteers who sat on either side of the debate: Thomas NadauldBrushfield and George Fielding Blandford.

By the time the OED project commenced, Europe already had majordictionaries under way or completed in German, French, Italian, Russian, andDutch, all of which were taking advantage of the new methodologies ofContinental philology. In Germany, the Brothers Grimm had begun theDeutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. In France, Émile Littré had begun theDictionnaire de la langue française in 1841 (a dictionary of post-1600French). In the Netherlands, Matthias de Vries had begun Woordenboek derNederlandsche Taal in 1852 (a dictionary of post-medieval Dutch).

Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm were also lexicographerswho created and edited the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent ofthe OED. Or rather I should say, the OED is the English equivalent of theDeutsches Wörterbuch, because the German dictionary was started first (evenif it ended up being finished later because the Brothers Grimm died beforethe letter G, and it took another hundred years to complete).

By the time that section of the letter C was published for the OxfordEnglish Dictionary the only cunt that was listed by Murray was cunt-, a cross-reference to the prefixes cont-, count- with no mention whatsoever of thefemale body part. Fuck was also left out. Although these old words had beenin use since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, they wouldhave to wait until the 1970s to be included in the OED. Murray did, however,include pudendum, a word derived from Latin for ‘that of which one ought tobe ashamed’, which he defined as ‘the privy parts, the external genital organs’with no reference to a woman or – God forbid – her vulva.

“This is the science that concerns itself with plants in their local association in the various climates. This science, as vast as its object, paints with a broad brush the immense space occupied by plants, from the regions of perpetual snows to the bottom of the ocean, and into the very interior of the earth, where there subsist in obscure caves some cryptogams that are as little known as the insects feeding upon them.”

during the first decades of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt was the second-most famous person in the world after Napoleon.

In literature genetic criticism studies the development of a work from reading notesand drafts; this approach is most feasible after the mid-19th century, once national librariesstarted amassing the working papers of authors, either by bequest or by purchase.5

Ollendorff was heavily indebted to an early "modern method" teacher, Jean (John) Manesca, who appears to have written the first fully developed modern method language course in the early 1820s.

French science was much more profession-alized and institutionalized than was the case in either of theother European powers. Specifically, they found that morethan half of all the coauthored scientific articles in theirhistoric sample had been produced by French scientists.