THE DICTIONARY PEOPLE

The history of the creation of a dictionary built on a passion for words.

In her last days living in Oxford, before taking a teaching position at Stanford, linguist and lexicographer Ogilvie, who had worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, discovered six handwritten address books noting the names of more than 3,000 contributors to the project. Beginning in 1879, these men and women, from all over the world, had responded to a plea by the OED’s editor James Murray to submit words and their context for inclusion in the massive dictionary. Based on the information in the address books, which had been carried on by Murray’s successors, Ogilvie spent eight years researching the contributors’ identities, resulting in a fascinating history of a quirky population of individuals, some university educated, some autodidacts, who had in common a love of reading, a keen sensibility, and a desire to be part of a prestigious endeavor. Her lively compendium of dictionary people includes an archaeologist living in Calcutta who submitted 5,000 words that she discovered in religious books and travelers’ tales; the inventors of the electric tricycle, the sewage pipe, and indelible green ink for printing money; several men incarcerated in mental institutions, one of whom was a murderer; a pair of lesbian lovers; and suffragists, such as the secretary of the Birmingham Women’s Suffrage Society, whose submissions were drawn not from her political involvement but from her reading in philosophy and religion. Ogilvie’s archival sleuthing unearthed juicy scandals. For example, before becoming a contributor, groundbreaking photographer Eadweard Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover, for which he was acquitted by reason of insanity and justifiable homicide; and surgeon and Arctic explorer Sir John Richardson saw his reputation tarnished by accusations of murder and cannibalism during a failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. While bringing to life a host of passionate volunteers, Ogilvie also charts decades of social, economic, and cultural change, mapped by words.

A fresh, vibrant, entertaining history.