In the beginning, of course, was the word. Since then, thanks to words - sounds, their written forms and precise, specific meanings - a lot has been accomplished by humankind that isn't done routinely by gerbils and rhinoceroses. If the hypothetical challenge were to decide what one book to save from a global, wipe-out-everything fire, the Oxford English Dictionary, known to its pals as the OED, would be neck-in-neck with the Bible. Famously, W.H. Auden often took one of the OED's 20 volumes to bed with him, to browse and then to drift into the arms of Morpheus.
Husbandry of those precise, specific meanings is the work of dictionaries and their creators. It is not to discredit the editors who have constructed and then frequently improved the many, many other lexicons of the English language to put the OED above them all.
Its own rich history has filled many books. Its ceaseless evolution - tracking that of the language itself since the earliest extant records - never ceases. It defines and otherwise informs its users about a total of about 615,000 words - in contrast to the 450,000 of Webster's Third New International Dictionary. (And, lest you ask, experts who accept the OED's 615,000 entries as the complete English-language vocabulary generally estimate German as having 185,000; Russian 130,000, and French almost 100,000.)
Precision is the heart of the enormity of the English language. Alfred Lord Tennyson, among several other dead venerables, has been credited with the insistence that there are only two words in English of exactly the same meaning. They are "gorse" and "furze" - to which if you are a Scot you may add the localism for that yellow-flowered wild shrub - "whin." The rest of the vocabulary stands alone - though sometimes with rather subtle lines of difference.
The complete OED's 20 volumes retail for $995. Three supplemental tomes cost $150 each. Oxford University Press also has turned out many lesser dictionaries, which range from a 3,984-page Shorter OED, coming out for $150 this September, to the Pocket OED, ninth edition, at $16.95. For $550 a year, one can subscribe to OED.com, which yields everything in the full-sized OED and is updated quarterly.
Now comes the complete OED in CD-ROM form. I have just spent the best parts of two days exploring it - 2nd edition, Version 3.0 ($295 retail) - on my home computer. It was a blissful experience - informative, of course, but also an unexpectedly delightful entertainment. Miraculously, the whole thing is compressed into two CDs - one required only for initial installation.
The system will run on Windows 95 through XP, but it requires a 200 MHz or faster Pentium-class processor, with 32 MB of RAM and a 16-speed CD-ROM drive. It fills 1.1 GB of hard-disk space to run it from your ROM drive, and an additional 1.7 GB to run it faster from your hard disk. There is no MAC version.
The CD does not offer the physical joy of leafing through the dictionary, wandering amid paper pages like Auden. However, a single click of a mouse button brings a typed-in word in complete definition, plus historical, etymological and literary associations. I went to gorse - of course.
Its tracings go from the year 725 A.D. until the present time, and include respect for "furze" and "whin," with 14 historical citations including Latin equivalents and other references.
The principal spellings are the British form, but U.S. spellings are given as alternatives - "harbour, harbor" - and you can search by them. The differences are obvious.
Fresh material
How about modernity? Definition number one for "astronaut" is: "name given to a space ship. Rare." The first citation is in 1880. The second definition is "one who travels in space," traced to 1929, in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. The main definition is "One who travels in space, i.e. beyond the earth's atmosphere, a student or devotee of astronautics."
There is "hippie, hippy," noun and adjective, first traced in 1953 to D. Wallop's Night Light. The definition is "a hipster, a person, usually exotically dressed, who is, or is taken to be, given to the use of hallucinogenic drugs; a beatnik." A swish of a mouse and two keystrokes take you to that term, with its first citation a 1955 article in New World Writing, attributed to Jack Kerouac.
A term dear to my mind, "psychobabble," falls under a general category of "psycho-," with lots of other affixes. It is defined as colloquial and originating in the U.S., "jargon that is much influenced by the concepts and terminology of psychology and is used esp. by laymen in referring to their own personality or relationships." It is followed by "psychobabbler."
Respecting Auden's urges, I was of a mind to think that this work on a computer screen would deprive me of the joy of gamboling and pirouetting over words, finding secrets and revelations in the manner that I had been doing since some time around the age of 5, the last 20 years or so with a two-volume miniaturized copy of the OED. But not so. I found I was spellbound - even faster. This device should be controlled, if not by the Drug Enforcement Administration, then by some other serious program designed to prevent terminal addiction.
Next to the entry on each word on the computer screen is a column of words on the alphabetical flanks of that one, inviting the same sort of skipping about that an open book would have done.
Linking up
Within many of the definitions, there appear blue underlined "links." A click of the mouse button transports you to other associated matters, near-synonyms, related phrases. This is a wonderful tool. You can click and fetch and roam and ramble endlessly - helplessly.
The OED doesn't take on jobs other than those of a dictionary. It is not a gazetteer or a biographical listing. It sticks to words, not names or places. Thus its entry for "Baltimore" is "Icetrus baltimorii" - "of the starling family, found throughout North America," first cited in 1889.
There's no mention of lords, cities or baseball players. But that hardly creates a ripple in this vast, engulfing, lovely sea of language.