Over the coming years the energies and fascinations of the Society turned steadily towards English. In the very early days a most curious parallelism developed between philology and, rather curiously it would seem today, the science of geology—with both rocks and the language thought to have a divine origin. Once Charles Lyell had published his Principles of Geology in 1830, though, it started to become evident and more widely accepted that the earth might not, after all, have been fashioned by God—and that being so, there was a period when the study of the language alone was thought divinely blessed, a science `beyond the domain of matter'. Until more sensible ideas prevailed some while later, the geological metaphor was still employed to describe the nature of English—such as in this description by William Whewell, a founding member of the Philological Society and Master of Trinity College Cambridge.
The English language is a conglomerate of Latin words, bound together in a Saxon cement; the fragments of the Latin being partly portions introduced directly from the parent quarry, with all their sharp edges, and partly pebbles of the same material, obscured and shaped by long rolling in a Norman or some other channel.
But although dictionary-making and geology long enjoyed a curious affinity, philology itself was eventually freed from what its adherents found a frankly rather weird association—an association born out of the belief that both sciences gave support to the words of Genesis and the orthodoxy of Christianity. Fifteen years after the Society's founding, though, such philosophical wonderings had rather diminished, and the Society was busily discussing such more obviously secular matters as `Diminutives in let', `On the word inkling', and `On the derivation of the word broker' (this last discussion led by Hensleigh Wedgwood). There were papers also on the complexities of some foreign tongues—on `The Termination of the Numeral Eleven, Twelve and the equivalent forms in Lithuanian', for example, and a spirited piece on the Tushi language, which is (or was) apparently well known in the Caucasian hill town of Tzowa, and which might be regarded today as a somewhat tricky tongue for beginners, given that the Tushi for the number 1,000 is the sonorously complex form of words sac tqauziqa icaiqa.
In June 1857, while the members were gamely pausing to learn Tushi counting (cha, si, xo, ahew pxi, jetx …), three of their number—Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall, and the Dean of Westminster, Richard Chenevix Trench—set about discussing their principal concern about the English language. It was a worry that had begun to evolve from decades of undefined uneasiness, such that now at last it was a settled concern: that the dictionaries then currently in print were just not good enough. William Whewell had mentioned such a thought back in 1852, when he was still gripped by the idea that English had been handed down from the clouds. Five years later, and under the guidance of the holy xo, the ideas began swiftly to coalesce.
The Philological Society, these three men supposed, would be the body best suited to remedy the situation. And as that summer of 1857 began so they decided that their best contribution to philological inquiry would be to establish a Committee to ascertain just what words might have been left out of the English dictionaries. They would call it the Unregistered Words Committee, and its members would go out of their way to scour the literature and read newspapers and popular journals and listen to song scores and to conversation, and thereby add significantly, it was hoped, to the understanding and inventorying of the total stock of English words.
The first report of this Committee was to be announced five months later, at a meeting of the Society due to be held on Guy Fawkes Day, Thursday, 5 November 1857. There was much anticipation. Philology is by reputation a somewhat arid calling; but on that Thursday night there was a buzz of excitement from the members who filed in through the cold and foggy gloom into the London Library—a body which had long hosted the Society, in an unheated upstairs room in the premises still occupied, at the north-west corner of St James's Square.
So it was to general surprise and initial dismay that members were informed that the Report would not in fact be read that night. In its place one member of the Committee, the eminent divine Dean Trench, soon to be Archbishop of Dublin but at the time Dean of Westminster, 12 would present the first part of a paper. It was to be called `On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries'.
This was the paper that finally brought substance to what had hitherto been a half-formed presentiment. This was the document which at long last defined the problem that had long nagged at the serge-clad shoulders of a score of wordsmen. This was the presentation that was to set in train the events that would lead, inexorably, to the making of the dictionary that all since Stanley Baldwin have considered to have—or which has long striven to have—essentially no deficiencies at all.
The audience, all men, most of them middle-aged, most of them resplendent in frock coats or in the astrakhan-collared capes and greatcoats and silk scarves and top hats that had comforted them against the cold yellow November fog, listened attentively to the grave Doctor as he enumerated the problems. There were, in essence, seven.
Obsolete words, for a start, were not fully registered in any dictionary thus far published. Secondly, families or groups of words were only capriciously included in these same dictionaries—some members of families made it in, some did not. Then again, such histories of words as were included in dictionaries rarely looked back far enough—the cited earliest appearances of many words was all too frequently given as far more recent than their actual inauguration, because the research had been performed too sloppily. Fourthly, important meanings and senses of words had all too often been passed over—once again, the research had too often been too perfunctory. Little heed had been paid to distinguishing between apparently synonymous words. Sixth, there seemed to be a superabundance of redundancy in all previous dictionaries—too many of them were bloated with unnecessary material, at the expense of what was really wanting. And finally, much of the literature which ought to have been read and scanned for illustrative quotations had not been read at alclass="underline" any serious and totally authoritative dictionary had perforce to be the result of the reading and scanning and scouring of all literature—all journals, magazines, papers, illuminated monastic treatises, and volumes of written and printed publicly accessible works great, small, and impossibly trivial.
No, nothing that had so far been made was good enough. What was needed was a brand new dictionary. A dictionary of the English language in its totality. Not a reworking of the existing mis-formed and incomplete works; not a further attempt to make any one of the past creations somehow better or more complete; not a supplement, as the Unregistered Words Committee planned to publish. No, from a fresh start, from a tabula rasa, there should be constructed now a wholly new dictionary that would give, in essence and in fact, the meaning of everything.
Whatever this was, it had to be a book—an enormous book, quite probably, though not even Dean Trench was bold enough to hazard a guess as to how enormous—that did its level best to include the totality of the language. And by that was meant the discovery and the inclusion of every single word, every sense, every meaning. The book had to present a complete inventory of the language—such that anyone who wanted to look up the meaning of any word must be confident of finding it there, without a scintilla of doubt.