Open Source-ing the Oxford English Dictionary by risa
“The big dictionary’s making began with the speech (made by Richard Chenevix Trench) at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, 1857…
The new venture that Tench seemed now to be proposing would demonstrate not merely meaning but the history of meaning, the life story of each word. And that would mean the reading of everything and the quoting of everything that showed anything of the history of the words that were to be cited. The task would be gigantic, monumental, and- according to the conventional thinking of the times – impossible.
Except that here Trench presented an idea, an idea that- to those ranks of conservative and frock-coated men who sat silently in the library on that dank and foggy evening- was potentially dangerous and revolutionary. But it was the idea that in the end made the whole venture possible.
The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of the English literature – and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals – must be instead “the combined action of many.” It would be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge one – probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.
The audience murmured with surprise. Such and idea, obvious though it may sound today, had never been put forward before. But then, some members said as the meeting was breaking up, it did have some real merit. It had a rough, rather democratic appeal. It was an idea consonant with Trench’s underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demostrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.”
Simon Winchester. The Professor and the Madman; A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. NY: HarperPerennial, 1999. 105-107.
Leave a Comment