MAKING A FAMOUS DICTIONARY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14566, 31 December 1910, Page 4 (Supplement)

MAKING A FAMOUS DICTIONARY.

Maw extraordinary facts relating to the preparation of the great and still unfinished Oxford English Dictionary were stated by its editor. Sir James Murray, in a lecture at the London Institution.

In 1877, Sir James said, he had the offer from an Knglish and -American Jinn of publishers to edit the dictionary, and forthwith materials for it began to pour in upon li.m from a,ll quarters of the Uritieh Isles and beyond the seas. Quotations to illustrate meanings of words numbering millions and weighing tons were cent to him. Much of the accumulated materials of 25 years' collecting had been sent by iho numerous voluntary sub-editors to the late Dr. FurnivallV house, whoro they were stored in hampers and sacks. To discover further materials he himself had to make, journeys to distant- country houses and parsonages, where he found in some cases that the original collectors had died and that their unsympathetic successors had relegated bundles of precious quotations to the- stables.

Then ho was confronted by the problem here he could place the weight in tons of the three million quotations lie had collected. If stored in his house at Mill Hill they would have tilled it from top to bottom. The notion of leasing an adjoining cottage'for them had to be abandoned for fear of fire. Eventually he had an iron room erected in his garden. In the Scriptorium at Oxford were pigeon holes. «,ch of which held 6000 quotations, and the total collection numbered five million. If posterity should want a dictionary of 100 volumes the materials were ready In that iron storehouse.

If the live million quotations were laid end to end they would stretch 550 miles— from London into Scotland —and the writting if extended would reach from England to the Great Wall of China. If a man started reading these quotation-., one quotation a minute during an eight hour: Jay, he would take thirty years to finish. ll;,i:!Yi. A legicographer who desired to '<e accurate, the lecturer observed, had to be a universal inquirer. Ho illustrated the nature of these investigations and verifications by some typical examples. To the Director of Kew Gardens he had to write for the best record of an exotic plant ; to a Jesuit Father on a point of divinity ; to a Newcastle boa"bulkier regarding the keels on the. Tvne: to the India Office about a word mentioned in a letter of tlio year 1620; to Yarmouth for a full description of a bloater; to Lord Tennyson about the meaning which he attached to the word •"balm-cricket," which lie used in his lines : " The liahn-crirkel carols clear Id the green that folds thy grave."