Q&A WITH SARAH OGILVIE ABOUT HER NEW BOOK THE DICTIONARY PEOPLE
In an exclusive interview, we talk to Sarah about her deep dive into the fascinating characters behind The Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn’t just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928, its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians.
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of the OED. She traces the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language, from the eccentric autodidacts to the family groups who made word-collection their passion. With generosity and brio, Ogilvie reveals, for the first time, the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world - and celebrates to sparkling effect the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People.
Order the bookAUTHOR Q&A: SARAH OGILVIE
As a lexicographer, you’ve always been interested in words. How did a project that demanded a fascination for people – quite a different area – come into play?
I’m a word nerd and I love discovering other word nerds. But it is not a big leap from writing the biography of a word to writing the biography of a person. As a lexicographer, when I describe the life of a word in a dictionary, it is similar to writing a biography of a person. Perhaps English Heritage asks similar questions of its historic sites? I ask myself where and when was the word born? How does it behave? What company does it keep, e.g. what other words does it occur with most? Has it ever come close to death, or has it died already? What might it do in the future?
These are very similar questions that a biographer asks of their human subject, and which I asked when researching the people around the world who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19th century. I wanted to find out everything that I could about each person: where they lived, who they loved, the books they read, and the words they contributed to the dictionary.
The OED was one of the first crowd-sourced projects, the Wikipedia of the 19th century. When the dictionary began in 1858, the founders wanted to create a dictionary of every word in the English language. The founders knew that a small group of men in London or Oxford could not accomplish such a mammoth task alone, so they reached out to the public for help, asking people all around the world to read their local books and send in words in quotations from those books on small slips of 4 x 6 inch paper.
They had no idea whether it would be a success or not, but it was a massive success. So many people sent in words that Royal Mail had to put a red pillar box outside the house of the longest-serving editor, James Murray, at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford. It is still there today.
You’ve written 26 chapters – one for each letter of the alphabet. How many people’s stories did you have to read before you chose your ‘stars’? It must have been very difficult…
I wrote the book in such a way that readers could read a short chapter before bed each night. It turned out that there were 3,000 people who helped create the Dictionary. I researched as much as I could about all of them, and then chose the most fascinating and captivating characters who were most important to the Dictionary project. Most of the Dictionary People were not the famous scholarly elites whom you might expect. But rather, they were amateurs and autodidacts, unknowns who had had nothing written about them before, so I collaborated with my students and we trawled through 19th-century censuses, old newspapers and archival records such as marriage and death certificates. It was a labour of love. That’s why the book took me eight years to complete. Eventually I had to tell myself “Stop the madness, Sarah, write the book!”
Which contributor’s story most surprised or shocked you, and why?
I was shocked to discover that there were three murderers among the contributors to the Dictionary (only one of whom went to prison), a pornography collector (who sent in the sex words), far more women than we thought, entire families who sat around the gas light and wrote out slips together and a cocaine addict who was found dead in a railway station lavatory, to name just a few.
As you delved into these extraordinary lives, whose individual story resonated with you the most, and for what reason?
The person who moved me most is in the chapter ‘L for Lunatic’, which tells the story of John Dormer, a brilliant young man who worked so hard for the Dictionary that he ended up in a psychiatric hospital, or lunatic asylum, as they were called at the time. Another of my favourite contributors is in the chapter ‘O for Outsiders’ - Joseph Wright, who was born to a poor family in Yorkshire. He started working at the age of six years old as a donkey boy in a Yorkshire mine. By the age of 15 he still could not read or write, but he eventually became a professor at Oxford. I won’t say anything more in case it spoils it for the reader!
You must have got to know these people very well with your research – were you able to identify any common traits that led them to becoming involved with the Dictionary, in what must have been quite an unusual occupation among their peers?
Over the years that I have been researching them, I have fallen in love with the Dictionary People. Most were never paid for their work. The person who sent in the most contributions sent in 165,000 slips. There was a generosity, dedication and joy to these people that was contagious. I hope that this joy comes across to the reader. I think they were motivated by a love for the English language and a desire to be part of a project, attached to a prestigious university, which gave them access to a world from which many of them were excluded.
Where will you go with your writing now, after the fruition of such an intriguing project?
I'm writing a new book about all the things that I love about words and language.
