He suffered from delusions, thinking that the Irish were trying to kill him (Winchester 16). William Chester Minor was born in Connecticut, became a surgeon, and served in the US army during the Civil War (Winchester 13). Thousands of people answered the call for help, but one individual in particular contributed to the OED like a madman.ĭr. But it was physically impossible for Murray and his associates to read everything ever written, so they asked for contributors to send in words with definitions, quotations, and illustrations to add to the project. This final method was to be employed by the Oxford lexicographers. There are several ways to find words to put in a dictionary: listen to words spoken, copy words from other dictionaries, or read (Winchester 94). Quotations could show exactly how a word had been employed over the centuries” (Winchester 25-6). It was Murray's believe that quotations needed to be in the dictionary in order to “demonstrate the full range of characteristics of each and every word with a very great degree of precision. He devoted twenty-eight years of his life to the dictionary before his death in 1915. He was born in Scotland and was self-educated. When the idea of the dictionary was proposed in 1879, it was predicted to be 6,400 pages which would take ten years to complete however, five years after the project began, the dictionary had reached only the word “ant” ( Oxford). In essence, the OED is a “biography” for every English word (Winchester 105). The objective is to record “every word, every nuance, every shading of meaning and spelling and pronunciation, every twist of etymology, every possible illustrative citation from every English author” (Winchester 103). It is an etymological analysis of words ( Oxford). The unique aspect of this reference is that it not only gives definitions for terms, like a dictionary is commonly understood to do, but the OED gives the meanings, history, pronunciation, and spelling of every word in the English language, both past and present. English is a world language, spreading all over the globe, which means that the language is constantly expanding, so all words, written, spoken, and read, should be documented (Winchester 87). The purpose of a dictionary is to encompass a language “in its entirety,” the easy words as well as the hard ones, the common words as well as the obscure ones (Winchester 86). The OED is the “accepted authority on the evolution of English language over the last millennium” ( Oxford). The idea for a new dictionary was proposed by the Philological Society of London at the time it was titled New English Dictionary, but it would become known to the world as the Oxford English Dictionary. It was not until one hundred years later that a project was begun which would far outperform the work of Johnson. The project took him nine years to complete single handedly (McCrum 117-9). This respectable publication documented 40,000 words and provided 114,000 quotations. The first, what would today be called, “dictionary” was compiled in 1604 by a man named Robert Cawdray A Table Alphabeticall was only 120 pages. When Beowulf, the greatest and oldest single work of Old English, was composed, there was no dictionary when Chaucer wrote the legendary Canterbury Tales, there was no dictionary, when the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, produced his graceful poems and plays, there was no dictionary.
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