How a cannibal, cocaine addict and three murderers created the OED

How the world’s greatest dictionary was created by a cannibal, a cocaine addict, 3 murderers, a xenomaniac and a pornographer

One day, in the musty basement archive of the Oxford University Press, I came across a small black book tied with cream ribbon that would lead me on an extraordinary journey. With its yellowing pages, stiff covers and disintegrating binding, it was the sort of find that most academics can only dream of.

That small volume was the 150-year-old address book of James Murray, the longest-serving editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. An astounding work of scholarship, today the dictionary runs to more than half a million words and takes up 20 volumes. But far from being created by a team of dons and professors, the OED was in fact the Wikipedia of its day — assembled by a vast army of ordinary people.

It was these dedicated, unpaid and often highly eccentric volunteers who were painstakingly listed in Murray’s address book, and whose personal stories I began an eight-year quest to discover. Three murderers and at least four inhabitants of psychiatric institutions are listed as contributors alongside a colourful cast of housewives, factory inspectors, engineers, social campaigners and a host of others.

Murray, a kindly and devoted family man who had left school at 14 with no formal qualifications, organised his thousands of volunteers, recruited globally through newspaper advertisements, over a 36-year period, from 1879 until his death in 1915.

His contributors, or readers, were invited to search any book they had to hand for unusual and interesting words and to send the editor examples of how they were used on 4in x 6in pieces of paper, known as slips.

Sub-editors verified and checked the work, helping write the definitions and classifying the contributions. The dictionary was printed in alphabetical instalments, with A and B being published in 1888 and V to Z not until 1928.

In 1884, Murray moved from London to Oxford to complete his work. His office was a corrugated iron shed at the end of his garden which he named the Scriptorium. And all the while the Dictionary People carried on: reading, researching, writing. Meet the amazing crowdsourcers who created a legend…

Three murderers and at least four inhabitants of psychiatric institutions are listed as contributors alongside a colourful cast of housewives, factory inspectors, engineers, social campaigners and a host of others

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A is for Archaeologist

Margaret Murray (no relation to James) was just 18 and living in India with her family when she read about Murray’s request for contributions. Over the following seven years she supplied around 5,000 slips, including Anglo-Indian words such as durzee (a tailor) and mehtar (a sweeper). She went on to become an eminent archaeologist and Egyptologist and an authority on witchcraft who, friends said, would try to reverse academic appointments she disapproved of by casting a spell in a saucepan.

B is for Best Contributor

In terms of sheer numbers, the outright winner is Thomas Austin, from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, who submitted an astounding 165,061 contributions over a decade. He eventually became enraged that he wasn’t being paid, sending a ‘violently abusive’ letter to Murray. The two stopped speaking, but, amazingly, Austin did not stop writing slips.

C is for Cannibal

Sailor-adventurer Sir John Richardson had unknowingly eaten the flesh of a colleague during a voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. Though unsuccessful, the crew nonetheless charted 500 miles of Arctic coastline. Words from his writings made their way into the dictionary including beaver (the rodent) and beech (the tree), as well as words related to indigenous cultures, among them parka (a hooded jacket).

D is for Dictionary Word Nerds

James Dixon, a retired surgeon, helped with medical terms. He advised Murray to delete the entry for appendicitis because it was just another ‘itis’ word, causing embarrassment after Edward VII’s 1902 Coronation was postponed as he was suffering from appendicitis. Suddenly, everyone was using the word — but no one could find it in the dictionary.

E is for Europeans

More than 50 people living in mainland Europe contributed to the dictionary. Mostly learned and scholarly, 14 lived in Germany and 11 in France, followed by the Netherlands (nine) and Austria (six). The Brothers Grimm, of fairytale fame, were also lexicographers who had pioneered collaborative research when they started work on the German equivalent of the OED 20 years earlier.

F is for Families

All of James Murray’s 11 children were drafted in to help with the OED, with two even featuring in it. ‘As fine a child as you will see’ (written by the workaholic Murray at his wife Ada’s bedside after the birth of daughter Elsie) appears in the first volume as an example of when ‘a’ follows an adjective. And under ‘arrival’ he provided the example, ‘The new arrival is a little daughter’ — their next child, Rosfrith.

Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813-1891) championed the simplification of English spelling

G is for Glossotypists

Along with the philologist Alexander Ellis and Napoleon’s nephew Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Murray championed the simplification of English spelling. A system called ‘Glossotype’ was embraced by the group. 

In a letter Ellis invites Murray for a meeting at Bonaparte’s house: ‘Kan eu kum?’ he asks. ‘If soa let me noa az ei promist too infaurm dhi prins.’

H is for Hopeless Contributors

Murray’s address book is littered with furious annotations: Dr Brinsley Nicholson, of Shepherd’s Bush, West London, has ‘no good’ scrawled across his entry, while W. Doig of Sheffield was ‘gone, no address’. Of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, another reader, Murray wrote that her work was close to useless.

READ MORE: ‘WAGWAN WITH OUR BEAUTIFUL ENGLISH LANGUAGE?’ IRAN RAMZAN ARGUES NOT ALL CHANGE IS GOOD 

I is for Inventors

The 19th century witnessed the full bloom of the Industrial Revolution — and a flurry of new vocabulary. 

The arrival of proper drainage saw the words sewage and sewerage (1834); and sanitary (1842) enter the language.

The invention of the bicycle, prompted definitions such as velocipede: ‘A travelling-machine having wheels turned by pressure of the feet upon pedals; esp. an early form of the bicycle or tricycle, a ‘bone shaker’.’ 

Murray was a keen cyclist whose signature method of dismounting was to fall sideways on to the ground.

J is for Junkie

Although the word did not exist until 1923, it aptly describes Eustace Bright, one of the dictionary’s most brilliant, yet tragic, volunteers. 

A promising young doctor, he became fascinated by medicinal uses of cocaine and morphine, experimenting with them himself and dying of an accidental drug overdose in a railway station lavatory aged 29.

K is for Kleptomaniac

Sidney Herrtage, a former engineer, was the first of 44 editorial assistants to Murray. He was fired in disgrace when it was found he was simultaneously working for the fledgling Cassell’s Encyclopedia Dictionary, smuggling information and books from the Scriptorium to the rival publication.

L is for Lunatics

All of Murray’s top four contributors had connections with mental asylums. William Douglas, of Primrose Hill, London, who sent in 151,982 slips, was described in the census of 1871 as a ‘Lunatic’, while Thomas Austin (see B, above) had spent time in various institutions suffering from delusions and paranoia. 

John Dormer, one of the most conscientious sub-editors, was admitted to a psychiatric facility in 1907 and diagnosed with a nervous breakdown because of ‘overwork’.

Dr William Chester Minor (1834-1920), an American surgeon, was one of three murderers who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary

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M is for Murderers

The fourth-highest contributor, former surgeon William Chester Minor, was one of three murderers among the Dictionary People. Held in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after shooting dead a man he mistakenly believed to have robbed him in a brothel, he suffered psychotic hallucinations, and accused guards of forcing him to have sex with women.

In a vain effort to cure himself of his sex addiction in December 1902, Minor took the knife he used for opening book leaves, went to the Broadmoor gardens and severed his own penis. He survived the mutilation but his contributions were never the same again.

N is for New Zealanders (and Australians)

On the other side of the world, Edward Ellis Morris, a British university lecturer and language expert living in Melbourne, Australia, was busy doing his bit. Like many of the volunteers, he became obsessive about the work, evangelically recruiting contributors and supplying the majority of the OED’s New Zealand and Australian vocabulary. 

He eventually collected so many words that he wrote his own dictionary, Austral English: A Dictionary Of Australasian Words, Phrases And Usages, published in 1898.

O is for Outsider

Most of the Dictionary People were outsiders, far removed from the establishment and intellectual elites. Many were self-taught, including Joseph Wright, born in a Yorkshire village and still illiterate at 15.

His mother had put him to work as a donkey boy in the local mine at the age of six, driving a cart from 7am to 5pm to carry tools for quarrymen. 

By sheer force of will and an astounding work ethic he rose to become professor of comparative philology at Oxford University and a close friend of Murray, whom he advised on dialects.

Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1901) was a respected businessman and secret pornographer whose risque contributions made Murray blush

P is for Pornographer

Occasionally, slips would arrive at the Scriptorium which made the strict Presbyterian and teetotal Murray blush, containing such offerings as infibulation (fastening the sexual organs with a clasp and now used to describe female genital mutilation).

The most likely sender was Henry Spencer Ashbee, a Victorian businessman and married father of four who owned the world’s largest collection of pornography.

The risque offerings created a dilemma. Should Murray stick to his principle that every word in use deserved a place in the OED, or should he safeguard its moral tone? Luckily, academic rigour triumphed.

READ MORE: ‘TO AXE POETRY FROM THE SYLLABUS HAS NO RHYME NOR REASON’, WRITES MELVYN BRAGG 

Q is for Queer

Poet Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper,

16 years her junior, were enthusiastic contributors to the dictionary in the late 1800s.

During this period they became lovers, remaining together for the rest of their lives, addressing each other as ‘my beloved’ and moving in London’s leading literary circles. The word ‘queer’ in the sense of ‘homosexual’ may have been used in speech at the time, but it was not used in writing. It did not get into the dictionary until 1982.

R is for Rain Collectors

One of Murray’s most assiduous readers, Mrs Mary Pringle from Beckenham, Kent, measured rainfall every morning in specially designed copper gauges and glass tubes in her garden, sending her findings to the British Rainfall Organisation in London. The rest of her day was spent preparing words for the OED.

A more scientific approach to weather, exemplified by Mary’s interest, spawned words which we still hear on forecasts today: ridge (1847), weather system (1862), isobar (1864), heatwave (1878), and trough (1882).

S is for Suffragists

The lifespan of the making of the OED runs in almost exact parallel with suffragists’ fight for votes for women. Their story can be plotted by new words related to the movement: feminist (1852); women’s suffrage (1868); women’s liberation (1898); suffragette (1906); sisterhood (1914); and hunger striking (1916). 

Numerous suffragists were in Murray’s address book, among them Emily Davies, who fought for women’s admission to higher education and founded Girton College, Cambridge.

T is for Tramps

The name of a group of contributors who met for Sunday walks or ‘tramps’ organised by Leslie Stephen, father of Bloomsbury Group icons Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

The rambles incorporated visits to the rural homes of such figures as Charles Darwin and novelist George Meredith before fizzling out when ‘the deceitfulness of golf and the vanity of bicycles distracted some of those who had been consistent walkers’.

U is for USA

Everyone thinks of the OED as quintessentially British, but the founding documents declared that Americanisms must be admitted ‘on the same terms as our own words’.

From the staggering 10 per cent of the Dictionary People who were U.S. citizens came ranching words including pound (an enclosure for cattle), bison (a wild ox) and rutting season (a mating season). Mrs Anna Thorpe Wetherill was a Philadelphia anti-slavery activist who hid escaped slaves at her home and whose contributions included abhorrent and abolition.

Novelist Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) was one of 500 women who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary

V is for Vegetarians and VEGANS

Although regarded by some as crankish, vegetarianism grew in popularity during the 19th century and was embraced by prominent figures such as Emily Lutyens, wife of the famous architect Edwin. 

If you went for dinner chez Lutyens you might be served a grim nut cutlet (a savoury cake of chopped nuts and vegetables invented in 1908, followed later by nut roast and nut loaf). The word vegetarian was first used in 1842, while vegan did not appear until 1944.

READ MORE: ‘LETS RISE UP AGAINST THE VERBAL VANDALS WHO TERRORISE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE’, WRITES TOM UTLEY 

W is for Women

Nearly 500 women in all contributed to the OED, among them a host of philanthropists, scholars, translators, teachers and novelists. 

But for quirkiness Edith Phibbs, a mummy collector from County Sligo, Ireland, is the winner, thanks to her custom of displaying a collection of Egyptian mummies and other artefacts in an upstairs room of her home, leading to rumours the property was haunted.

Her contributions included geological terms such as siluroid (fish with no scales) and hydrothermal (relating to heated water).

X is for Xenomaniacs

The year in which James Murray started editing the OED, 1879 also saw the coining of the word xenomaniac, someone with an insane fancy for foreigners.

One such was eccentric philologist Alexander Ellis (see G for Glossotypists), who regularly wore a coat containing 28 pockets, each stuffed with useful items such as nail clippers, string, books and papers and, charmingly, a scone, lest any of his friends should find themselves feeling peckish. He once wrote to a friend of his distress that he had narrowly missed meeting a genuine Icelander.

Y is for Yonge

Novelist Charlotte Yonge had been helping sub-edit the letter N for Murray’s predecessor Frederick Furnivall before taking an extended holiday.

On her departure she was asked by the OED’s publishers to take the N paperwork with her and work on it while travelling, which she had refused to do. We can only imagine her irritation when the chaotic Furnivall wrote to her in 1877 to ask for the work she had done on ‘N’. Her reply was tart. ‘You must have my Ns somewhere, for I put them all into their sack and sent them back to you I should think four or five years back.’

Z is for Zealots

By the time the word zealot (someone who is fervently or passionately devoted to a cause) was published in the OED in May 1921, the dictionary’s greatest zealot, James Murray, was dead, having succumbed to pleurisy aged 78 six years earlier.

The last entry bearing his handwriting was, poignantly, the word twilight: ‘The light diffused by the reflection of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere before sunrise, and after sunset.’

He had been relentless in his pursuit of perfection and rigour, with nothing able to thwart his resolve and dedication: not hopeless contributors, nor kleptomaniacs, nor mercurial colleagues. The English-speaking world owes him an immense debt of gratitude.

• Adapted from The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created The Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie (Vintage Publishing, £22) to be published on September 7. © Sarah Ogilvie 2023. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid until September 2, 2023; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

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