Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (face rubbed), in mitre and red cope, with crosier, seated on left speaks to a seated group of five people, mostly women. Tree on right; large bird with long beak at top.

but they left their own belovedmanuscript unclassied and undescribed, and thus it never attainedthe status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and wasinstead tacitly understood to be merely a “nding aid,” a piece offurniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject tojanitorial, rather than curatorial, jurisdiction—even though thiscatalog was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered thebuilding would be likely to have in common, to know how to usefrom childhood, even to love. A new administrator came by onemorning and noticed that there was some old furniture taking upspace that could be devoted to bound volumes of Technicalities, TheElectronic Library, and the Journal of Library Automation. The cardcatalog, for want of having been cataloged itself, was thrown into adumpster.

The authors made one serious mistake, however. Although theyhad taken great pains to be sure that within their massive workevery book and manuscript stored in their building was representedby a three-by-ve page, and often by several pages, describing it,they had forgotten to devote any page, anywhere, to the very book

Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their earlymasters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure—that is,a system of referential links—of remarkable coherency andresolution.

he very degree of wornness ofcertain cards that you once ipped to daily but now perhaps do not—since that author is drunk and forgotten or that magazine editorhas been red and now makes high-end apple chutneys inBinghamton—constitutes signicant information about what partsof the Rolodex were of importance to you over the years.

Would it bestretching things too much, you suddenly wonder, to call yourRolodex a form of autobiography—a manuscript that you have beenwriting these fteen years, tinkering with, revising?

By the early seventies, therewas an ominous arrearage of uncataloged material waiting on herdsof rolling carts near the overtaxed cataloging departments of mostlarge libraries. Cataloging had reached a state of crisis

SUNY Brockport’s Drake Memorial Library greets its userswith a typographically generated image of a card catalog:Your automated catalog, by DYNIX.Copyright (c) 1992 by DYNIX, Incorporated.

Thus, the New York Public Library has CATNYP.There is BEARCAT (Kutztown University) and ALLECAT (Allegheny) andBOBCAT (NYU’s Bobst Library) and CATS (Cambridge). There is VIRGO(the University of Virginia), FRANCIS (Williams College), LUCY(Skidmore), CLIO (Columbia), CHESTER (the University of Rochester),SHERLOCK (Bualo State College), ARLO (the University of Colorado atColorado Springs), FRANKLIN (the University of Pennsylvania), andHarvard’s appropriately Eustace Tilleyish HOLLIS. There is BISON(SUNY Bualo), OASIS (the University of Iowa), ORION (UCLA),SOCRATES (Stanford), ILIAD (Butler), EUCLIDPLUS (Case Western), LUMINA(the University of Minnesota), and THE CONNELLY EXPLORER (La Salle).MELVYL (the University of California system) is named after MelvilDewey; the misspelling was reportedly intentional, meant toemphasize the dierence between Dewey’s cataloging universe andour own.

, one of the reasons that the New York Public Library had toclose its public catalog was that the public was destroying it. TheHetty Green cards disappeared. Someone calling himself Cosmoswas periodically making o with all the cards for Mein Kampf. Cardsfor two Dante manuscripts were stolen: not the manuscripts, thecards for the manuscripts.

book at a public phone rather than bothering to copy down anaddress and a phone number, library visitors—the heedless, thecrazy—have, especially since the late eighties, been increasinglycapable of tearing out the card referring to a book they want.

Radical students destroyed roughly ahundred thousand cards from the catalog at the University of Illinoisin the sixties. Berkeley’s library sta was told to keep watch overthe university’s card catalogs during the antiwar turmoil there.Someone reportedly poured ink on the Henry Cabot Lodge cards atStanford

They donot grow mold, as the card catalog of the Engineering Library of theUniversity of Toronto once did, following water damage.

obody canexpect a library to maintain sequences of alphabetized cardboard fora collection that is growing, as some currently are, at a rate of vehundred items a day.

“Atthe end of this project,” Dale Flecker told me, “there won’t be cardcatalogs left in the university.” I asked him if there were any cardcatalogs, anywhere in the world, that he thought worthy ofpreservation. “In general, they’re being discarded,” he said. “I’m notsure I know of anybody who’s decided to preserve them as physicalobjects.” Maureen Finn said much the same thing to me: “Theinstitutions still want the cards back, and then I think they’re storingthem. But most library managers that I talk to will say, ‘We arestoring them because it makes the sta feel good, and we will begetting rid of them.’ ”

And some undetermined but large fraction of thetotality is being sent to an artist named Thomas Johnston, atWestern Washington University.

“Library hand” was a special kind ofbackward-slanting penmanship meant specically for card catalogs,and taught in library school through the 1920s.

Even OCLC, one ofthe very best retrospective-conversion contractors in the business, isbound to make thousands of typos in the course of a huge projectlike the Harvard “recon.”

(The more modication a library demands of eachMARC record, the more it costs.) In Harvard’s case she typicallyaccepts the record as is, even when the original card bearsadditional subject headings or enriching notes of various kinds.

Each operator, though initially hired asa temp, and, in some cases, no more than high-school-educated, isthe survivor of a rigorous two-week training program. (Most hiresdo not make it through training.)

OCLC owns the largestdatabase of bibliographic information in the world, and it oers aservice called RETROCON, contracting with libraries to transfer oldcatalog cards to “machine-readable form,” at anywhere from ftycents to six dollars per card.

An image of the front of every card for Widener thus now exists onmicroche, available to users in a room o the lobby. (Anyinformation on the backs of the cards—and many notes do carryover—was not photographed

theMaryland Health Sciences Library published a commemorativechapbook called 101 Uses for a Dead Catalog Card.

At Cosumnes River College, in California, the card catalog wasceremonially put out of its misery by an ocial who pointed a gunat it and “shot” it. D

The cards datingfrom 1911 to 1975 at the New York State Library in Albany (whereMelvil Dewey was librarian from 1889 to 1906) were thrown awaylast month as a consequence of a historical-preservation projectinvolving the building in which they were stored.

The New York Public Library, ahead of the game, renovated theentire ten-million-card catalog of its Research Libraries between1977 and 1980, microlmed it, and threw it out.

universities and public libraries have completed the“retrospective conversions” of their catalogs to computer databases(frequently with the help of federal Title II-C money, as part of the“Strengthening Research Library Resources” program),

cards printed by theLibrary of Congress, Baker & Taylor, and OCLC;

Chancellor Edward N. Brandt, Jr., wearing ared T-shirt that said “The Great Discard,” chose a drawer of thecatalog and pulled it from the cabinet. With the help of a beamingCyril Feng, who was then the director of the library, he drew theretaining rod from the chosen drawer and let its several hundredcards ceremonially spill into a trash can decorated with coloredpaper.

Discards

Introducing Dewmoji: Emoji for Dewey Decimals®. A joke on Twitter about finding Emojis for every top-level Dewey Decimal class spun out of control and I ended up implementing something half-wonderful and half-terrible!

Curtis mentioned one example of information that he found: “One of the first drawers of the author-title catalog I looked through held a card for Benjamin Smith Barton’s ‘Elements of Botany’ [the 1804 edition]. The card indicated that UVA’s copy of this book was signed by Joseph C. Cabell, who was instrumental in the founding of the University.”Curtis checked to see if the Virgo entry included this detail, but he found no record of the book at all. “I thought perhaps that was because the book had been lost, and the Virgo entry deleted, but just in case, I emailed David Whitesell [curator in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library] and asked him if this signed copy of Barton’s ‘Elements of Botany’ was on the shelves over there. Indeed it was.

The information neatly typed on the cards – which library workers sometimes supplemented with handwritten notes on front and back – includes details that in many cases are not typically part of the electronic catalog system, Virgo, that the University Library switched to in 1989. At the time, the catalog was transferred by scanning that captured only the front of the cards.

Created over a 50-year span from 1939 to 1989, that catalog grew to about 4 million cards in 65 cabinets with 4,000 drawers.

Founded in 1956, Highsmith is a distributor of equipment, supplies, and furniture to public, academic, and school libraries.

Library supply company Highsmith, headquartered in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, has been purchased by Lab Safety Supply, a direct-marketing subsidiary of Chicago-based facilities maintenance supplier W. W. Grainger. Terms of the acquisition, announced in the business press July 10, were not disclosed. Highsmith’s operations, with anticipated sales for 2008 in the range of $20–$30 million, will be integrated with LSS by the end of the year.

My first spread doing this, I am so excited :D

Some weeks ago I explain the philosophy of Antinet Zettelkasten to my girlfriend. She was sceptical at that moment but when she saw my purple metal box full of cards and dividers she started to gather information and with her father made this one. The name is zauberkasten (magic box in german) and this is not the final version. Hope you like folks! :)

The smallest collection of card catalogs is near the librarian’s information desk in the Social Science/Philosophy/Religion department on lower level three. It is rarely used and usually only by librarians. It contains hundreds of cards that reflect some of the most commonly asked questions of the department librarians. Most of the departments on the lower levels have similar small collections. Card catalog behind the reference desk on lower level three, photo credit: Tina Lernø

The surname Index for the library’s genealogy includes 315 drawers of about 750 cards each for a total of more than 236,250 cards patrons can use when they visit the History/Map/Travel section, photo credit: Diana Rosen

The delight-inducing art piece, A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, is featured in the two elevator cars on the north side of the building, accessible in the Tom Bradley Wing.One car has cards for the "Comprehensive" and the other for the "Complete" works of various authors and topics. When moving, the elevator cars expose cards in the shaft window that reflect books that are found on the floor the elevator is passing.Artist David Bunn was given nearly 2 million catalog cards to play with for his art installation, yet he only used a little more than 9,500 in the two elevator cars. He has, since the early 1990s, been creating art projects, found poetry, and sculptures with the remaining cards.

any of his words did not getinto the Dictionary, such as one for Brizvegas, the local nickname forBrisbane, but thousands of others did.

All thequotations have one thing in common – they hail from the Brisbane Courier-Mail.

surrounded by leafy rubbertrees and frangipanis

turn off the light, and take off his shirt, his shorts, and his underwear.

Those times are better captured in the ten volumes, 414,825entries, and 1,827,306 quotations that were finally published in 1928.

Despite a weak constitution, hewould walk several miles a day in the countryside of his native Lincolnshire,spotting plants and making copious notes in his diary, which he carried, alongwith a pen and inkpot, in one of the many special inner pockets that he hadsewn into his jacket.

On 3 June 1912 Edward Peacock wrote inshaky handwriting to James Murray from his deathbed: ‘I have been so longill – more than a year and a half, and do not expect ever to recover, that Ihave made up my mind to discontinue The Oxford English Dictionary for thefuture.’ He added in a postscript, ‘I am upwards of eighty years of age.’ Bythen Peacock had been a volunteer for the Dictionary for fifty-four years,making him one of the longest-serving contributors. He had submitted24,806 slips and had given great service to Murray not only as a Reader butas a Subeditor and Specialist too.

another word which he invented but whichwas never picked up by anyone else: crinanthropy, judgement or criticism ofother people.

These included Dame Elizabeth Cadbury, who went on to be one of themost significant philanthropists of the early twentieth century, creating withher husband George the ideal Bournville village for workers at the Cadburychocolate factory in Birmingham

Another science-fiction writer and vicar among the Dictionary Peoplewas the Revd Edwin Abbott Abbott, who came by his repeated last namebecause his parents were first cousins.

‘Jirt’, as the childrencalled Tolkien (short for J.R.R.T.)

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).

reading John Almon’s Anecdotes of the Life of William Pitt (1792), andproduced 600 slips, alongside her social work, in 1879.

In 1894, she moved to Oxford andher days as a Dictionary contributor came to an end as she took up the post ofLibrarian of Manchester College, the Unitarian college that had opened itsnew buildings in Oxford the year before. The Unitarians and the college hadalways been radical – already co-educational before any other college – so theappointment of a female librarian was in keeping with its spirit. LucyToulmin Smith, with her extensive scholarship and networks, and from an oldUnitarian family, was the perfect candidate.

Several of the books he wrotewere read for the Dictionary resulting in him being quoted eighteen times forlinguistic prosody terms such as acatalectic, not short of a syllable in the lastfoot; disyllabize, to make disyllabic; hypercatalectic, having an extra syllableafter the last complete dipody; and pyrrhic, a metrical foot consisting of twoshort syllables.

wrote a scholarly article on the derivation of the word akimbo

And, of course, he was a vegetarian, a cause he embraced in middleage. Or we might say he thought he was a vegetarian; the college chef was soworried that Mayor was abstemious and getting too thin that he added meatstock to the soups that Mayor preferred to eat. Mayor was also a teetotaller.Although he didn’t foist his diet or abstention onto others, he did spread theword in his books: Modicus Cibi Medicus Sibi, or, Nature her Own Physicianin 1880, What is Vegetarianism? in 1886, and Plain Living and High Thinkingin 1897. He contributed articles to Dietetic Reformer and VegetarianMessenger, publications of the Vegetarian Society. He became President ofthe Society in 1884, a position he held until his death in 1910 when he waseighty-five – and he attributed his healthiness in later life to his diet andascetic mode of living. Over this period, Mayor had witnessed new words fortypes of vegetarians: veg (1884), fruitarian (1893), and nutarian (1909). (Theword vegan would not appear until later, in 1944.)

He was avoracious collector of books and when he ran out of space for them in hiscollege rooms (where he lived) he acquired a little house nearby for theoverflow. He was generous, often giving books away, and yet he still left18,000 volumes when he died, bequeathed to the library he had overseen

the word vegetarian did not existbefore 1842 (until then, those who abstained from meat were called‘Pythagoreans’ or ‘Grahamites’)

An article on the Scriptorium by the classical scholar Basil LanneauGildersleeve, who was a Specialist and had visited Murray in 1880,

A quarter of the Americans in the address books were like Gildersleeveand Ernst, Specialists. The rest were Readers. Proportionally, there were halfas many Specialists in America than in Britain, which makes sense because adictionary editor usually wrote to a Specialist for a quick response, whileworking on a particular word, and the delay of the post to America wouldhave proved too slow for Murray and his tight schedule.

One of Murray’s most helpful advisers on American words was aGerman living in Boston, Carl Wilhelm Ernst. Ernst was a journalist, theeditor of the Beacon newspaper, and a former Lutheran minister who hadmoved to America when he was eighteen years old. Murray wrote to thejournalist in a panic when completing the entry for public school. ‘In workingat this, I overlooked the fact that we had nothing for the US use, and findmyself now almost stranded, and unable to complete the article.’ He wrote toErnst asking for illustrative quotations and for clarification on the Americansense of the word: ‘It is said to be synonymous with Common School. I donot know which of these is the official appellation, and which the popular, orwhether they are both so used. We should like to know this. The designationin England has a long and rather complicated history coming down from theL. publican schola, which is already used by Jerome of Quintilian.’Murray started the entry by defining the use of public school in Englandas ‘originally a grammar-school founded or endowed for the use or benefit ofthe public’ but more recently, in the nineteenth century, as ‘the old endowedgrammar-schools as have developed into large boarding-schools, drawingfrom the well-to-do classes of all parts of the country or of the empire’. Henoted that ‘the ancient endowed grammar-schools or colleges of Eton,Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury’ aresometimes referred to as ‘the Seven Public Schools’. He contrasted this senseof public school with that in Scotland, the British colonies and the UnitedStates of America, as a school provided at the public expense, usually free.Above six American quotations spanning from 1644 to 1903, Murray added alengthy note, thanks to Ernst’s advice, ‘The term has been used in NewEngland and Pennsylvania from the 17th c., and has been adopted in all Statesof the American Union. An early synonym was “free school”, and a later onein some States, “common school” which is now however generally confined toa school of the lowest grade or “public elementary school”.’

Arber also suggests to Murray in this letter that he should use atypewriter. ‘I am quite certain’, he wrote, ‘that the only way to keep down thecost of corrections is to type-write the copy’, suggesting a model called theIdeal Caligraph, no. 2 price £18. Murray did read The Snake Dance of theMoquis of Arizona but he did not buy a typewriter.

A Professor of English at Mason College (later BirminghamUniversity), Edward Arber, kept Murray informed of new American bookswhich might provide Americanisms. He wrote to Murray on Christmas Eve1884, ‘Another book, quite a new one which I would also bring to yourattention is Bourke’s The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona. It is full ofthe latest Americanisms, such as the verb “to noon” for taking the noontiderest, while a male lover is said to “whittle”, what that is, I have no idea. Is itan Americanism for connoodle? It is a most interesting book in itself andwould refresh you, if you read it yourself.’

The Dictionary’s coverage of the leading transcendentalist, HenryDavid Thoreau, is largely due to the monumental efforts of a single woman,Miss Alice Byington of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who sent in 5,000 slipsfrom books that included several by Thoreau:

The American who sent in the most slips was a clergyman in Ionia,Michigan, Job Pierson. A Presbyterian minister, book collector, and librarian,Pierson had the largest private library in Michigan (which included a bookpublished in the earliest days of printing, from Vienna in 1476). Over elevenyears, from 1879 to 1890, Pierson, who had studied at Williams College andattended Auburn Theological Seminary, sent in 43,055 slips from poetry,drama, and religion. His correspondence with Murray shows the breadth ofhis reading, from Chaucer (10,000 slips) to books on anatomy (5,000 slips),and lumbering (1,000 slips).

Byington shared her uncle’s interest in and support for indigenousculture and language, serving as President of the Stockbridge branch of theIndian Rights Association, and on the Education Committee for the Women’sNational Indian Associatio

But it was her uncle, the RevdCyrus Byington, who had the greatest influence on her life and interests. Hehad been a missionary with the Brewer sisters’ father to the Choctaw NativeAmerican Communities at the old mission station in Stockbridge; he hadtranslated the Bible into Choctaw, and wrote a grammar and dictionary of thelanguage.

The New England Telephone Company had planned to put a pole intheir front yard and workers from the company began digging the hole. Butthe Brewer sisters and Byington came out and sat in the hole, blocking theirefforts by sleeping there in a tent overnight. The telephone company installedthe pole across the road instead, making this a successful result fornineteenth-century Nimby activism.

to scrinch, tosqueeze one’s body into a crouched or huddled position.

gloryhole, a drawer in whichthings are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness;

There was a high number of librarians among the Americans, such asCharles Ammi Cutter of Harvard and the Boston Athenæum (who producedAmerica’s first public library card catalogue).

Tribes of the Extreme Northwest by the American naturalist WilliamDall was another important book on the indigenous peoples and languages ofAlaska, western Washington, and north-western Oregon

Francis March also helped with the etymologies inWilliam Dwight Whitney’s Century Dictionary (1889–91) and IsaacFunk’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language (first volume publishedin 1893).

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.

He was an early ecologicalactivist, warning against human-induced climate change before anyone else,and publishing in 1864 Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modifiedby Human Action.

In this context, Marsh invited members of the American public to helpcreate a radical new dictionary of all English which applied the scientificmethod, was collaborative in its making, and was based on written evidence.They were asked to collect current words and especially to read books fromthe eighteenth century – because literature from earlier centuries was harderto get in America at the time. Marsh ended his appeal with the warning thatAmericans would be paid nothing for their help.

in 1864, Webster’s Unabridged was published and it marked animportant moment in modern lexicography: no longer the idiosyncratic workof one man, this dictionary was the product of a collaborative team withNoah Porter as Chief Editor and the German scholar Carl A. F. Mahn asetymologist

When Marsh sent out his appeal for American Readers, what wasknown as the ‘Dictionary War’ had been waging for some time between twoleading lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. Worcester hadbeen Webster’s assistant on his American Dictionary of the English Language(1828) but, a superior philologist to Webster,

In 1858, the year after the idea of the Dictionary had been mooted by theLondon Philological Society, the New York Times informed American readersof a ‘fresh appeal to scholars, and lovers of learning and philological inquiry,for additions to their vocabulary’.

American contributors were underlined in red in Murray’saddress books.

Some Americans did write directly to Murray, and these – 196 ofthem – are the ones underlined in the address books. They represent 10 percent of all the Dictionary People with addresses and produced a total of238,080 slips that crossed the ocean before coming to rest on Murray’s deskin the Scriptorium.

outfangthief, a tricky entry that took Murray three people andsix letters before he nailed its definition as ‘the right of a lord of a privatejurisdiction to claim for trial a thief captured outside the jurisdiction, and tokeep any forfeited chattels on conviction’.

Maitland co-wrote History of English Law with Frederick Pollock.

The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland helped Murray on current legalterms such as bail, defend, culprit, and deliverance, and also many obsoleteones such as couthutlaughe, a person knowingly harbouring or concealing anoutlaw; abishering, a misreading of mishersing, freedom from amercementsimposed by any court; compurgator, a character witness who swore along withthe person accused, in order to the acquittal of the latter; pennyland, landhaving the rental value of one penny; and contenement, holding, freehold.

The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland

the novelist George Meredith who lived in Box Hill, Surrey, and wouldrelish the opportunity of serving cups of refreshing Russian tea to the‘Learned Tramps’ or ‘Cranium Tramps’, as he often called them.

Stephen was ‘Captain of Tramps’, choosing the route, striding aheadwith his characteristic impatient snort and alpenstock in hand, and setting thetopics for conversation.

The motto of the Sunday Tramps was Solvitur Ambulando, ‘It is solvedby walking.’

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’.

Stephen kept sending slips toMurray for twelve years, until 1891

during theyears that Leslie Stephen contributed to the OED, he started his owncrowdsourced project, the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Just asMurray’s Dictionary traced the lives of thousands of words, Stephen’sdictionary traced the lives of thousands of people who made a notable impacton British history. Stephen invited 653 people to write 29,120 articles. Sixty-three volumes comprising 29,108 pages were published, the first volume in1885 and the last in 1900. The DNB is still going today, under the aegis ofOxford University Press, and it now covers the lives of 55,000 people.

Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’

That is the general sort ofanswer one gets which means ‘we write for amusement, & not tobe studied as texts; if you make school-texts of us, yours be theresponsibility!’ I believe Browning once answered a request forexplanation of a passage, with ‘I really do not know; ask theBrowning Society.’

Katharine also read her friend John Ruskin’s book The Eagle’s Nest(1872), lectures on the relationship between natural science and art, for theDictionary, writing out 1,000 slips.

had a general suspicion of words used by poets, as expressed in a letterwritten in 1901 discussing the use of voidee-cup, a cup of wine with spicestaken before retiring to rest or at the departure of guests, in a poem by DanteGabriel Rossetti. Murray did not know the meaning of the word:

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

Robert Browning was a great favourite and also a greatfriend. Katharine sent in 500 slips from his Dramatic Idyls of 1879, and Amyproduced 300 slips from the same book.

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.

Jane Austen was the first person to write the word outsider.

Dr Minor would read a text not for its meaning but for its words. It wasa novel approach to the task – the equivalent of cutting up a book word byword, and then placing each in an alphabetical list which helped the editorsquickly find quotations. Just as Google today ‘reads’ text as a series of wordsor symbols that are searchable and discoverable, so with Dr Minor. A manualundertaking of this kind was laborious – he was basically working as acomputer would work – but it probably resulted in a higher percentage of hisquotations making it to the Dictionary page than those of other contributors.

Over thetwenty-three years that Minor had sent in slips to the Scriptorium, he mainlyread travellers’ tales and medical texts from the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. It was the travellers’ tales that interested me because they broughtthousands of words from indigenous languages around the world into theEnglish language.

Very early one chilly morning in October 1895, Fielding Blandfordstepped into a horse-drawn carriage with Edith Lanchester’s father and twobrothers. The four men arrived at Edith’s rented lodgings in Battersea. Theywoke the whole house with heavy banging on the front door, and FieldingBlandford forced his way in to ‘examine’ Edith. He ordered that she be takento an asylum because she was committing ‘social suicide’ by insisting on livingwith her working-class lover without marrying him. He justified this byarguing that under the Lunacy Act 1890 he would have certified her had sheattempted (normal) suicide.

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.

Ranking below Thomas Austin, who sent in 165,061 slips, and WilliamDouglas, who sent in 151,982, there is a big drop to the third-highestcontributor Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield, who sent in 70,277 slips.

The man who solved the problem was an American chemist, who alsocontributed to the Dictionary, Thomas Sterry Hunt. In 1857, he had beenteaching at Laval University in Quebec and responded to an appeal by thePresident of the Montreal City Bank who was battling counterfeit notes. Huntcreated a special green ink, using chromium sesquioxide, that was pretty wellindestructible. Numerous experiments showed that you couldn’t remove itfrom the banknote without destroying the paper itself – until one chemistsucceeded in doing so, and the Canadians dropped Hunt’s invention. But theAmericans took it up, especially on the back of their banknotes, hence thecolloquial term ‘greenbacks’ for US dollar bills, which was given its own entryin the OED in 1900 and defined as ‘the popular name for one of the legal-tender notes of the U.S., first issued in 1862 and so called from the devicesprinted in green ink on the back’, alongside something rather topical at thetime but now archaic, Greenback Party, defined as ‘a party in U.S. politics,which advocated that “greenbacks” should be made the sole currency of thecountry’, and its various derivatives Greenbacker and Greenbackism.

As long as money hasexisted, the problem of counterfeit currency has too, but it became aparticular problem once printed notes went into general circulation. Ineighteenth-century North America, Benjamin Franklin – who owned a firmthat printed money for several of the colonies – hit on the idea of misspellingPennsylvania on official currency, on the grounds that forgers would spell it

Developed out of real (or royal) tennis, not only were nationaltournaments established – Wimbledon in 1877 and the US Open in 1881 –but every provincial town now wanted its own lawn tennis club. Old wordstook on new meanings connected with the game – love (1880), chalk (1886),volley (1875), smash (1882), lob (1890) – and new words emerged as thegame evolved and grew in popularity – grass court (1875), first serve (1878),second serve (1878), centre court (1883), hard court (1885), doubles (1894),ground stroke (1895). Murray included reference to the game in the very firstvolume, in 1884, defining the word ace as ‘a point at rackets, lawn tennis, etc’

The Indian languages Specialist, Edward Brandreth, had D, D4, and D5beside his name in the address books and spent tireless hours in the BritishMuseum searching for fillers. Murray sent this retired member of the IndianCivil Service a total of 35 lists of desiderata, and Brandreth sent himthousands of quotations in return.

Alexander Beazeley, an engineer who specialized in lighthouses andsent in a total of 38,233 slips, many of which were desiderata and did notrelate to lighthouses.

theRevd William Lees, a vicar outside Reigate who sent in a total of 18,500slips;

Volunteers like Taylor who could fill gaps in quotations and search outdesiderata were invaluable to Murray. They were marked in the addressbooks by numbered D’s when desiderata lists had been sent to them, and by asmall Star of David sign when a third list had been sent.

Murray responded a week later, giving instructions on how to read.This was towards the very end of his life and his instructions to Miss Taylorgive rare insight into Murray’s reading tips, especially instructions for readingfor desiderata, in this case words beginning with S, T, and U–Z: ‘I shouldsuggest looking it through and marking with a pencil dot such words as arementioned in the enclosed note, and any others that strike you as noteworthy,and then go through it copying out from the marked ones those immediatelywanted for the letters at which we are working the better parts of S & T, andsending these as soon as ready; then proceed to those in U to Z, and finallythe earlier words for our Supplement. I hope you will not find it too tedious;and I should be sorry if it were allowed to interfere with other calls.’

The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’

Readers were asked to choose words they considered ‘rare’ and the choice ofthese words was random – they were not guided by Murray on what wasneeded. This resulted in a dearth of quotations for common words whichultimately had to be found by Murray and his assistants. In the first part of theDictionary alone, ‘nearly the whole quotations for about, after, all, also, and,in Part I, and for any, as, in Part II, have had to be found by myself and myassistants’, he explained to the Philological Society. If he had his time again,he said that he would have directed his Readers differently, with theinstructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare,peculiar, or peculiarly used.’

two small flaws in the Dictionary’s compilation process

And yet he desperately needed the help of Subeditors because the task wastoo massive to do alone. Two years into the job, Murray had estimated thathe had sent out 817,625 blank slips to Readers. If they returned them withquotations, and if he spent a minimum of 30 seconds reading each one andallocating it to the correct sense of an entry, it would take him three workingyears to get through a third of the materials gathered.

Murray received a poignant letter in 1906 fromthe wife of William Sykes of South Devon who had been a one-timeassistant, and faithful Reader and Specialist for twenty-two years, sending in atotal of 16,048 slips: ‘My dear husband died last Friday, the day he receivedyour letter, he was able to read it, and wrote your name in one of the books Iam going to send you eight hours before he died. It took him an hour to writeit, but he made up his mind to do it, and did. The last words he ever wrotewere to you.’ A poignant last line from the impoverished widow reads, ‘I shallsend the books when the probate duty has been paid.’

Miss Clowes of Ipswich and Miss Wheaton of Bloomsbury Square‘threw up’ (gave up)

One might have expected that the architectresponsible for the Liverpool Public Library, and after whom its main readingroom is named, Sir James Allanson Picton, would have been an ideal Readerfor the OED but Murray wrote ‘no good’ and put a red squiggle through hisentry.

Across the entry for T. W. Tonkin of Barnes, who had sent in nothingfor a sixteenth-century polemical work against female monarchs, The FirstBlast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by theScottish Protestant Reformer John Knox, he wrote in blue pencil, ‘Impostor –Stole the Book’

From the moment in March 1879 whenMurray signed the contract with Oxford University Press to be the next Editorof the Dictionary, and he took possession of 2 tons of slips at his house, hisfamily was immediately part of the project (whether they liked it or not)sorting out the slips. Their house was a workplace and the family aworkforce.

Helwich was the fifth-highest contributor

The most prolific Reader in Europe – we might call him a ‘super-contributor’ – was Hartwig Helwich, a professor at the University of Viennawho wrote out the entire Cursor Mundi onto 46,599 slips. His efforts madethe medieval poem the second-most-frequently cited work in the Dictionaryafter the Bible (though in the current OED, it has dropped to eleventh in thetop sources).

It was left to a handful of keen British scholars, by no means part of themainstream, to encourage others to take up Continental philology. Murrayand his colleagues at the London Philological Society, especially its foundersEdwin Guest, Henry Malden, and Thomas Hewitt Key, were main players inenlivening the British linguistic scene and adopting the methods ofContinental philology. Now known as ‘the oldest learned society in GreatBritain dedicated to the study of language’, the Philological Society wasfounded in 1842 as a forum for discussion, debate, and work on developmentsin philology. But all this innovation came comparatively late, and theGrimms, who were made honorary members of the London PhilologicalSociety in 1843, were at the heart of the European innovations. Theyinfluenced Continental philology; they practised the application of historicalprinciples; they pioneered the descriptive method of defining and tracing aword’s meaning across time; and they forged the crowdsourcing techniquesand lexicographic policies and practices adopted by the OED editors.

The study ofwords and language, otherwise known as ‘philology’, was all the rage inEurope at the turn of the nineteenth century. European scholars haddeveloped their own methodologies to compare languages and to trace thesource of a word, which became known as ‘Continental philology’. It was halfa century until Britain took up these methods, which are still practised todayand form the basis of comparative linguistics

We think of the OED as a radical dictionary because of its size, itsscholarship, and its methods, and it was radical for English. But if youcompare it with other languages, there was nothing about its creation in themid-nineteenth century that had not been done before in Europe. English wasrelatively late to the table. The English editors were able to pick and choosethe best methods from different European dictionaries. The OEDimplemented European lexicographic practices, and advanced upon them, tocreate something truly revolutionary, something that would in fact end upbeing the envy of Europe.

A section of a wall of slips in the Grimmwelt Museum showinghow the Brothers Grimm pioneered the methods used by theOED twenty years later.

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).

showing the hundreds of volunteers who corresponded with the brothers; theeditors’ lists of words and statistical counts of entries; the tracing ofetymology using the new scientific philological methods of the day; thegathering of citations from historical, published sources. I had worked in theOED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum lookedidentical.

There was a dramatic wall of vastnumbers of slips, or ‘zettel’, hanging from long nails.

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).

absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had tobe sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within alarger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising himnot to include the word condom. ‘I am writing on a very obscene subject.There is an article called Cundum ... a contrivance used by fornicators, tosave themselves from a well-deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoycopulation without the possibility of impregnation’, he wrote to Murray.‘Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair wasnamed after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.’ But he hadfound a quotation from 1705 referring to a ‘Quondam’ which made himrethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. ‘I supposeCundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary’, heconcluded. Murray left it out.

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.

a fellowlexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, hadhis own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with WilliamHenley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing theletters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took hispublisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jurythat writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personallyguilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs.Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Actby arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, notthe public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henleywas published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck andmany other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and thepublic outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

He had helped Murray with the very firstentry in the Dictionary – A: not only the sound A, ‘the low-back-wide vowelformed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips’, but also themusical sense of A, ‘the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major’, and finallythe algebraic sense of A, ‘as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used toexpress known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown’. Ellis washappy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, includingthe words air, alert, algebra.

a favourite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism,‘Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servantof the heart, and should never be its slave.’