The Press Saturday, April 15, 1922. The Oxford English Dictionary.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17430, 15 April 1922, Page 10

The Press Saturday, April 15, 1922. The Oxford English Dictionary.

"He would havo considered himself the " laughing stock of Wood street if ho had " chanced to spell 'socks' in any way « but 'sox.' » So Mr Wellsin "Kipps," fh the year of grace 1905. The underlying implication reminds ue of that economic statement of Professor Wyld: " There seems to be a distinct gulf between the speakers who say 'I beg "your pardon* by way of apology, and "resy, 'Oh, it's all right,' or 'lt "doesn't matter,' or 'Please, don't "mention it,' and those whg say 'Beg "pardon,' omitting the pronoun, and " expect the answer, 'Granted.' " But the thing to note, here and now, is that the quotation occurs on the first page of the last part of the second half of the tenth and final volume of tho New English Dictionary, commonly known as the Oxford Dictionary. This is not to say that the dictionary is finished, but it ia within such easy distance of the end that nothing now 1 remains for publication except the concluding portion of the worde. under "P," and the innumerable, or well-nigh innumerable, company of vocables that follow "Wash" under the letter "W." Its first and most famous editor, the unwearied scholar, Sir James Murray, had nursed the splendid hope that lue might live'! to see the work finished on his eightieth birthday, in 1917. It was not to be.' The war came with its shattering effect on all scholastic enterprise, and on the 28th July, 1915, Sir James died. "He will not write thp"last pages," it waa said in a:a appreciative tribute to his work, "but more "than that of any other man' his name "will bo associated with the/long and "efficient working of tfce great engine of research by which the dictionary " htis been produced.'' But many men had laboured, as the historical sketch of the N.E.D. included in the Oxford catalogue reminds us, before Dr. Murray entered into the fruits of their labour. The flrßt projector of the enterprise was the late Archbishop Trench, whose charming volumes on "The Study of Words," and kindred subjects, have given nourishment and pleasure to many thousands of readers. The poverty of existing dictionaries, and the lack of anything approaching a complete collection of the obsolete and rarer words in the language, moved him to urge the Philological Society "to undertake the collection of " materials to complete the work already "done by Bailey, Johnson, Todd, Web"stor, Iliohardaon, aud others, and to "prepare a supplement to all tho dic- " tionaries, which should register all " omitted words jind senses, and sup"piy all tho historical information in " which these works wore lacking, and " above all, should give quotations "illustrating tho first and last appcar- " anco, and every notable point in "the life-history of every word." That was as far back as 1857, but though the project was adopted and put in hand at once, and though the proposed supplement .found enthusiastic: editors in Sir Herbert Coleridge and Dr. Furnival, the latter a giant in liis way, twenty years passed by and nothing was published. But enormous; masses of material had been brought together in a more or less methodical manner, and in 1879 the Philological Society and the Clarendon Press combined to produce, under the editorship of Dr. Murray, not a supplement to existing dictionaries, but a now and adequately exhaustive dictionary of the English language. It is instructive to find how little they realised tho magnitude of the task that lay before them . They imagined that between six and seven thousand pages would suffida for tho whole work, and that it could be completed by a single editor, assisted by a small staff, in ten years' time. It was not until the year 1888 that even the first volume was published, and by October Ist, 1919, tho total number of pages published had reached 14,080. "Each page contains three columns " 10J inches long (112 lines on aver- " age), and each column is 2$ inches " wide—in all 42,240 columns, which if " placed end to end Would cover over I "six miles; the 4,780,880 lines of typ«

4 therein (173 miles) containing about " two hundred million letters and " figures, not counting punctuation " marks." Even as far back as 1882, tho editors had to deal with three and a-half million illustrative quotations " selected by about twelve hundred 14 readers from the works of more than " 5000 writers of all periods." Such figures take one's breath away, and when ono compares tho work with that done in Germany, Holland, a.nd Sweden, where similar enterprises hare been long afoot, the result of the comparison is no less surprising. The first volume of the 3>eutsches Woertcrbuch, the work of the groat pioneers in philology, the brotihers Grimm, was completely published in 1854. By the end of 1916 the total result of sixtyseven years of printing and publishing was some 20.500 pages, containing rather more than 10,000 pagos of the Oxford and covering on very various scales and with much irregularity of treatment about five-sixths of the German vocabulary. The Dutch Dictionary has been appearing for tho last fifty-oight years, and is far further off completion than the Woerterbuch, while the dictionary of tho Swedish Academy, which began to bo published somo thirty years ago, has liitiherto only dealt with about one-fifth of the Swedish vocabulary.

The final section of tho Oxford Dictionary, edited by that fine English scholar, Mt O. T. Onions, and dealing with tho letters X, Y, Z, runs to 105 pages, or 315 columns. It contains a total of 4746 words, as compared with the 127 in Dr. Jcthnson, and the 2335 in the "Century," many of which latter wore purely technical and are excluded from the present work. A comparison of the illustrative quotations is equally impressive. Johnson yields 355, the Centurv 1016, the N.E.D. 12,580. With on© of those quotations we began, and with another, given under Z, we shall close: "luorji Knmes used to say thjit "pronouncing tho letter V -in the " names Mackenzie and Menzies in the "English (way) was enough to turn "his stomach!"