The Dictionary People – Sarah Ogilvie

Most people wouldn’t give much thought to the compilation of a dictionary (especially these days, when 99% of the time we simply google “word+definition” rather than actually pulling the large book down off a shelf). Compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a mammoth undertaking, before the invention of Google and the internet, not to mention electricity in the home. It took decades, with contributions from more than three thousand contributors around the world. I learned as much from The Dictionary People, “a people’s history of the Oxford English Dictionary” by Sarah Ogilvie.

Ogilvie had just wrapped up a stint working as an editor on the contemporary Oxford English Dictionary when she “discovered” something interesting in the archives. An address book maintained by one of the OG editors, James Murray, listed each contributor to the first edition with biographical details (including their address, marital status, quality of their contribution, and more). Ogilvie went down something of a rabbit hole, learning more and more about these “dictionary people” – thousands of people who volunteered their time and effort, capturing hundreds of thousands of words for posterity.

Yes, the first Oxford English Dictionary was a crowdsourcing project that Ogilvie describes as “one of the most extraordinary and uplifting examples of collaborative endeavour in literary history” (or, more pithily, “the Wikipedia of the 19th century”). The contributors were, by the standards of Victorian era academia, incredibly diverse – including autodidacts, women, Americans, and “lunatics”.

In The Dictionary People, Ogilvie relishes the opportunity to share the stories of the kookiest contributors she was able to track down from Murray’s records. Among them, she found an erotic literature collector who contributed all the naughty words, a doctor who was committed at Broadmoor (and cut off his own penis in a fit of paranoid delusion), and an unwitting cannibal who survived a trip to the fabled northwest passage by unknowingly eating the flesh of his deceased companions (he was told it was taken from a wolf carcass).

The Dictionary People is divided into 26 themed chapters, arranged alphabetically (naturally): A for Archaeologist, C for Cannibal, J for Junkie, P for Pornographer, and so on. It’s a cute system and definitely apt for the content, but I think the service to the theme meant sacrificing some readability in the end product.

I think The Dictionary People would have benefited from a stronger through line, or more emphasis on the chronology of the dictionary’s development. As it stands, it reads like a series of only-loosely connected anecdotes about weird people who shared a hobby (contributing words to the dictionary project). In fairness to Ogilvie, she never claimed that the book would be chronological or comprehensive – but that didn’t stop me wishing it had been.

The stories of the contributors are interesting, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about them – especially given that so many of them would otherwise have been lost to the archives, unnamed and unappreciated in the 21st century. I have to stop short of calling it a definitive account of the development of the OED, but it’s nonetheless a good contribution to the history of that particularly valuable document.

Read The Dictionary People on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Dictionary People:

• “The a – z arrangement constrains the author into spending too much time on relatively trivial and boring details and lists. Focus on individual contributors is also a mixed blessing, as excessive personal details are included. Some of the individuals were far from “unsung.”” – iheartbooks
• “obvious agenda by author grade school writing , compares with see dick run” – oneoneone