The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
While browsing the Oxford University Press archives, academic Sarah Ogilvie came across the hitherto unknown black notebook of James Murray. Murray was the driving force behind the absolutely mammoth project that became the globally admired Oxford English Dictionary, and his painstakingly detailed notebook contained minutiae of all the contributors to the project, the hundreds of men and women who provided lists of words from their eclectic reading. Quite suitably, Sarah Ogilvie takes an alphabetical and discursive approach to the accounts of the contributors to the OED, and what a strange, compelling, intriguing and entertaining bunch of men and women they were. Some, like Eadweard Muybridge and Dr William Minor, gained fame and notoriety; others were just eccentric, together with the expected range of frauds and let-downs. Most were just the usual wordy-nerdy sort of folk.
The production of the OED and the co-ordination of all the work from across the world was a monumental task and an extraordinary achievement in the pre-digital days when every reference had to be read and collated from the source and painstakingly recorded in longhand. This was what we would now term a crowdsourced project, as the mission depended upon the mostly unpaid contributors from thousands of willing volunteers in Britain and the rest of the globe. An absorbing, informative incredibly well-researched, and thoroughly entertaining read.
