Chapter 9 Dr Murray’s Work on the OED
James Murray was very unhappy in the early years of his work on the dictionary and nearly gave up the work on several occasions. The Delegates at Oxford University Press were more involved in the everyday work of dictionary-making than he wanted, and he thought they were not giving him enough money. The work was taking much longer than he had expected, and his health was poor from the long hours he spent working on the dictionary.
But the Delegates had told him to publish small parts of the dictionary as soon as they were ready, to earn money, and the first of these was published on 29 January 1884. It was a cheap-looking book that had entries for some, but not all, the words beginning with A. This was five years after Murray had started as editor and twenty-seven years after Chenevix Trench’s lecture to the Philological Society.
Murray was proud, and all the many problems of making an enormous dictionary seemed to disappear when he held the little published part of a dictionary in his hand.-So, feeling optimistic the day before his Forty-seventh birthday, he told the world that the complete dictionary would be published in another eleven years. It took another forty-four years.
But at least people in England and America (where the dictionary part was on sale in New York For three dollars and twenty-five cents) could see the wonderful book that was slowly being created.
The first word in the first part was the letter a, which had four pages of entries.Then came a word that does not exist now, but in 1430 the word aa meant a stream. There was, of course, a quotation to prove this. Then there was a plant called an aal.
More usual words have their entries too, of course. There are entries for animal and answer in the first 350 pages of a book that eventually, forty years later, had 15,487 pages.
Six months after the first part was published, James and Ada Murray and their nine children moved to a new office in Oxford. Murray stopped teaching at Mill Hill School and worked full time on the dictionary. He worked hard, long hours for very little money.
The Murrays lived in a large house in the north of Oxford, at 78 Banbury Road. The house was called Sunnyside. It was large and comfortable and was the sort of house the Delegates themselves might live in.
Murray’s new office for working on the dictionary was put up in the back garden. The neighbours did not like a large office in the next garden, so Murray made it lower in the ground. This made it wet and cold to work in and also produced a hill of earth which the neighbours did not like either.
The editors who worked in the office did not like it because it was so uncomfortable, but it was a lot bigger than the Mill Hill office, which still exists, next to the library at the school. The new office also had a lot more space for the slips of paper: there were Shelves all round the office for them. There were long tables in the middle of the office, where the editors could work. Murrays chair was higher than his assistants’ (at Mill Hill his desk had been higher too), so he could look down on all the work of editing.
Slips came in by post every morning. One editor checked each quotation quickly to see that it was complete and all the words were spelled properly; then a second editor put the new slips into alphabetical order. This second editor was often one of Murray’s children, who were employed as soon as they could read, and paid sixpence a week for half an hour a day. A third editor then divided the entries into nouns, verbs and other parts of speech and then a fourth editor put the quotations for each entry in time order, starting with the earliest.
The meanings of each word were separated, following all the meanings the word had from its first use until that time. Then an editor wrote a suggested definition of the word — the most important part of most dictionaries — for Murray to check later.
It is not easy to write good definitions of words. There are rules. A noun must first be defined by the group that it belongs to (a chair belongs in the group ‘furniture’). And then the differences between the word and other members of the group must be explained (a chair is used to sit on).There must be no words in the definition that are more difficult than the word which is being defined, or less likely to be known. All the words in the definition must be defined on other pages of the dictionary; it cannot be possible for a user of the dictionary to find a word in a definition that cannot be found as another entry. Also the definitions must be simple and not too long.
After the definitions had been written, all the meanings for each entry were arranged from the first to the most recent. Then the user of the dictionary could see from the definitions, as well as from the quotations, how the meaning of the word had changed with time.
If there was any more work to do after this, it ~was done by Murray himself. Murray added the information about which language the word originally came from and how the word should be pronounced. This is an area that always causes problems, as people argue about which pronunciation is correct.
Murray then chose the best quotations. If possible, he wanted at least one sentence from the literature of each century in which the word was used -— unless it was a very fast-changing word and needed more quotations to show the changes of meaning.
Murray looked at the editor’s suggested definition and wrote the definition that went into the dictionary. The page was then printed in Oxford, in Walton Street, not far from Worcester College.
Murray’s letters tell us a lot about the difficulties. It was hard to make a dictionary. It was also hard to make sure that the publishers got back some of the money that they were paying in wages and costs all the time. The publishers hoped that two parts - 600 pages of finished dictionary — could be published each year. Murray tried to complete work on thirty-three words every day, but he often found that one word took him nearly a whole day.
Murray spoke about the difficulties of his work in a lecture to the Philological Society and wrote about them in the Athenaeum magazine. He wrote that dictionary-making was like going through a forest where nobody had ever been before. He wrote that there could be twenty or thirty or forty suggested definitions for a word like ab0ve.The editor had to put them all on the floor and move them about. It was like playing a board game, trying to see how the word had changed with time. He wrote that at other times it seemed impossible to define a word. He gave the word art as an example of this.
Murray did not say so in his report, but he solved the problem of the word art by sending it to Dr Minor. It was the first time that the dictionary-makers at Oxford had written to Broadmoor asking for help with a special word — though they did this many times afterwards.
The word art shows the problems that the dictionary—makers had. When they wrote to Dr Minor, they had already found sixteen different meanings for the noun, but they were sure there were more. Did Dr Minor, they asked politely, have any references for the word art?
Murray received eighteen letters offering help about the word art — most of them from people who had read about his work in the Athenaeum. But the most useful reply came from Broadmoor. Most readers sent in a sentence or two about the word art. Dr Minor had found twenty-seven quotations, most of them from Discourses, written by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1769.
It was clear to the dictionary-makers that this Dr Minor was not only very careful in his work but also produced a lot of quotations and could find a lot of books. They were very pleased.
The correspondence about the word art was the start of a relationship between Murray and Minor that lasted until death separated them thirty years later. This relationship, based on work for the dictionary, was stronger than ordinary friendship.