The Oxford English Dictionary is the biggest unfinished book in the world. It is also probably the only major reference work brought into being with the significant help of a raving lunatic.
An American lunatic, at that.
The first edition of the OED, published in 1928, defined 414,825 English words. The second edition, in 1989, defined more than half a million. Since then, about 15,000 additional words -- some new, some overlooked -- have been tallied. The third edition, scheduled for 2005, will include all these plus whatever other words are discovered or invented in the meantime.
Because the English language is a work in progress, an ever-expanding universe of ideas, meaning and nuance, labor on the OED never ends. Nor does the dictionary, much as its editors try, ever totally encompass its subject.
The original compilers probably undercounted the vocabulary of the language by nearly 50 percent, according to British journalist Simon Winchester, who may have found the best story of his career in the OED and its history, a story he has put into a new book titled "The Professor and the Madman" (HarperCollins, $22).
Winchester's stroke of good fortune came, as he tells it, "in my bath, reading a book on lexography." (No, it's not his usual bathroom reading.) He came across a reference to Dr. William Chester Minor, the most prolific contributor of published quotations to the OED.
The quotations -- gleaned from books or periodicals published in English throughout the centuries -- were solicited by OED editors about 20 years after the project was launched in 1857. Millions flowed in from all over the United Kingdom. The quotations are meant to illustrate how the defined words were used over time, how their meanings changed, and to fix, to the extent possible, when the word first appeared in the written language.
The quotations are considered vital to the dictionary's purpose. The first edition contained 1.8 million of them, on average more than four for each word defined.
Minor's contribution was unmatched. Over more than three decades he sent 170,000 quotations to the book's editor, the erudite and indefatigable James Murray. All of Minor's were found to be legitimate. About 10,000 were used, more than any of the dictionary's other contributors.
Editor Murray developed a natural curiosity about this volunteer, whose letters arrived from the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire. The two men maintained a polite, professional correspondence for nearly two decades, but every attempt Murray made to meet Dr. Minor was deflected. Nor would he come to Oxford, where the work on the dictionary was being done.
Eventually the two men met, but not before Murray learned why Minor would not visit Oxford: He was locked up in the Asylum for Criminal Lunatics at Broadmoor. And for good reason: One night in 1872, in a fit of delusional paranoia (he believed he was being persecuted by Irishmen) Minor murdered an innocent man in the London slum of Lambeth, a still down-at-heel neighborhood across the Thames from Westminster.
He wound up spending 38 years in Broadmoor before being released to his brother and installed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Time on his hands
Minor, originally from Connecticut, had been a Union Army physician during the Civil War. It was thought the violence severed his grasp on reality. He was confined briefly in the United States, then released. He went to Europe to rest and recuperate, but his illness overtook him again.
At the asylum, because he was rich, a gentleman, by the Victorian standards of his time, he was given two connecting cells, allowed to pay other inmates to work for him and permitted to purchase books, which he did, in great number.
When he heard the call from Oxford for volunteers -- issued in newspaper ads, pamphlets, literary magazines -- he signed on. So he was a lunatic. At least he had books, an inclination for bookish work, and, of course, all the time in the world.
Winchester's account of the interplay between Minor and Murray is interesting. The book has sold well in England, and recently climbed onto the New York Times best-seller list.
In fact, that success has prompted the Oxford press to offer a sale: a "Madman Special," offering the 20-volume Second Edition of the OED for only $995. The regular price is $3,000.
Winchester's book tells two stories. The first is of Murray and Minor, their relationship and separate lives. Murray was a self- taught philologist (a genius with words) who accepted the responsibility of implementing the great idea for the dictionary. The sad Dr. Minor lived his life taunted by violent delusions and sexual fantasies. He was dangerous, especially to himself: He amputated his own penis with a penknife in a vain attempt to end his sexual delusions. It was thought his constructive work for the dictionary may have bettered his lot somewhat.
The second story is of the OED itself, and the ambitious nature of it, "a quite elegantly simple impertinence," in Winchester's words. Its goal was to collect every word in the language, define it in all its nuances, tell where it came from, when it emerged. This was unprecedented, in English at least. The Italians had done it before.
The big question -- the "impertinence" of the enterprise -- is, of course, how does one go about collecting all the words in English, or any other language? There were, of course, other dictionaries in print, Samuel Johnson's being the most famous. It held 46,000 words, and took six years to complete.
The OED's first edition would hold nearly half a million and take 70 years to complete. Murray, its editor, would be dead 13 years when the last volume rolled off the presses.
But the earlier dictionaries could provide only a starting point. There was no foolproof formula to bring in all the words contained in what is probably the largest single language vocabulary in the world. Words had to be sought individually, through constant hours, months and years of poring over existing texts by volunteers, who were directed to "peruse all of English literature -- and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals."
The words they found, the quotations they sent in, these were all checked and verified by the editors back in Oxford. Most were discarded.
Many words would be missed, if only because of the way people lived in the British Isles in those days. It was, to a great extent, still a rural country. People lived and died knowing only their neighbors, in small hamlets behind mountains and in valleys, cultural time capsules where the language evolved differently and words were used that were known nowhere else.
For instance the last word in the OED is "zyxt."
"It was only spoken in West Sussex, a dialect of the verb to be," said Winchester.
Dialect words from other countries with large English-speaking populations -- the United States, Australia, New Zealand, India -- would not be included. They still aren't, but are published in separate dictionaries by Oxford.
The all-inclusive nature of the OED not only ran counter to the tradition of previous English dictionaries, but against those of other countries' and languages. Many of these foreign lexicons were also "selections" of words approved by official language police who presided over national academies; they kept the language "pure," and determined which words would gain admittance to it.
English, Winchester says, never pretended to be pure. It would, and will, accept any word, from any source, if the speakers of the language determine it to be useful. Ten percent of the words in English, for instance, are Latin. Winchester admires this flexibility. He regards it as a democratic impulse that has permitted English to grow into "the most subtle and flexible of languages."
Some people, like Jonathan Swift, thought English might be better served by the gentle governance of a national academy. There is some merit to the argument. English, "subtle and flexible" as it is, remains a nightmare of contradictions, exceptions to its syntactical and grammatical rules, and a chaos of spelling -- especially to foreigners trying to learn it.
Things have been good for Simon Winchester since he discovered the OED and the story of Dr. Minor. Though luck has not been a constant companion through his career, it has visited him now and again.
When Winchester left Britain's Oxford University with a degee in geology in 1966, a maiden aunt, who was a little deaf, thought she heard "theology," approved, and left him 500 pounds. It was like found money.
Addressing journalism
With his new degree in hand, Winchester went off to Uganda, where he realized geology wasn't his cup of tea. Stimulated by the stirring account of Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, written by James Morris, he decided that journalism would be.
"I wrote a letter to Morris, asking, well, how I could be like him," Winchester said.
Morris returned an encouraging response, and subsequent correspondence led to a friendship between the two, though not before an initial embarrassing incident.
"Years later I was in north Wales climbing when my partner said, 'Isn't your friend Morris around here?' " Winchester remembers.
Realizing that Morris did live nearby, Winchester called and then went around for tea. He knocked at Morris' door. It opened and Morris stood there in a dress.
"I said, 'Hello, Mrs. Morris.' " Pause. With most people in England, Winchester was ignorant of James Morris' sexual transformation to "Jan" Morris.
"She was in her hormonal stage then," said Winchester, recalling the chagrin of the moment, and of the entire visit.
"Later she wrote an apology for putting me through such a difficult social situation," he said. "Eventually we wrote a book together."
Simon Winchester is 54, an amiable Brit: He is balding, has a ready smile and wears sun-yellow ties. He has a voice one would hear on the BBC. He has worked on the Guardian and Sunday Times, and now free-lances. He has had two marriages and two divorces; he has three children and two homes, in New York and London, where he was born. He worked in Asia for about a decade, and visited some of the more remote parts of the world. He's been much on the road these days, promoting his book about the OED. The dictionary, he has learned, is a handy item to carry around.
"I was on an interview show when a guy called me up and tried to stump me," he said. "He asked me what delope meant? I had no idea."
Taking advantage of some intervening chatter between the show's host and the caller, Winchester typed the word delope into his laptop, where he already had his CD-ROM of the OED booted up.
A moment later he interjected casually with, "By the way, that word the caller asked me about, does it mean when a duelist intentionally fires into the air?"
"I hate you!" came a thin voice over the speaker.
Winchester's professional life has not been all triumph and fortune. He spent three months in an Argentine prison after being arrested with two other English journalists in Tierra del Fuego while covering the Falklands War in 1982. He was caught taking notes outside an Argentine naval base.
He has written a dozen books before this one, none of which has attracted much popular attention. One, in fact, "American Heartbeat," sold only 11 copies.
"I live in hope that one day it will be re-released and I'll have the last laugh," he says.
Winchester seems an optimistic fellow, but you can tell he's not holding his breath on this one.
Pub Date: 10/07/98