I’m not quite sure where I’d put all twenty volumes, but I don’t know an English major alive who wouldn’t secretly love to have his or her own copy of the OED. It’s really a lot more than a dictionary; it’s an encyclopedia of the English language. It was originally commissioned by the members of the Philological Society of London in 1857. They proposed a ten-year project, but the first edition actually took seventy years to complete. It contains definitions, pronunciations, etymologies, cross references, and quotations. The 1933 Preface states:
The aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records [ca. AD740] down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang.
The second edition is the one on sale now, and there’s a third edition in the works.
The OED is an amazingly ambitious project, but I think Samuel Johnson beat them hands down. The OED has always been produced by a committee (and remember, the 1st edition took seventy years to complete); the 3rd edition now in progress is the work of more than 300 scholars, readers, researchers, and consultants. Compare that to Johnson’s feat. As the editors of the Longman Anthology of British Literature explain, Johnson’s Dictionary, published in 1755, was
“a nearly superhuman accomplishment.” In seven years, a single author defined 40,000 words “with unprecedented exactitude, and illustrated [them] with more than 114,000 passages drawn from English prose and poetry of the previous 250 years.”“To explain a language by itself is very difficult,” Johnson writes in his Preface. I’ll say! Have you ever tried to define a word and found it difficult to do without using the word itself? Unless it’s a definition I’ve memorized, my definitions sound something like this: “Uh, it’s when you . . .uh . . .” or “Umm, it’s kinda like . . . no, more like . . .” I know what the word means, but explaining it is a different story. Imagine defining 40,000 words and then combing through the literary canon trying to find the best examples of all the different ways you can use those words. By yourself. Without a computer. No search engines; no databases. I can't imagine taking on such a task.
Johnson was a little hard on himself, I think. He continued, “That part of my work on which I expect malignity most frequently to fasten is the explanation; in which I cannot hope to satisfy those who are perhaps not inclined to be pleased, since I have not always been able to satisfy myself.”
Well, rather than “malign,” I stand in awe.
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