William Craigie
So radium is not listed in the completed first edition of the Dictionary, and makes its first appearance only in the 1933 Supplement—an 867-page volume it was found necessary to publish in order to list all the new words (such as radium) and all the new meanings and senses of already listed words which had appeared or had been invented during the decades that the Dictionary itself had been in preparation. It was therefore up to Craigie and Onions to write definitions for these new words and meanings—and to tackle entirely new concepts, like radium. Frederick Sweatman (or Henry Bayliss), it is supposed, had the first try.
First, he wrote a wondrously complex etymology, followed by the sparest of definitions:
Radium. [mod.L. radium (B. Balius Add. Lex. : not in DuCange). The orig. source is Preh.—adamispadi, to dig;—Antediluv. randam (unconnected with PanArryan randan.) Cognate with OH Hash, mqdrq; Opj. rangtrum; MHGug. tsploshm; Mubr. dndrpq; Baby. daddums and N.Pol. rad are unconnected.] The unknown quantity. Math. Symbol x.
Cf. Eureka.
And then he had fun with an almost endless list of quotations and explanations, offered here in abbreviated form:
Aristotle De. P.Q. LI. xx says it may be obtained from the excrement of a squint-eyed rat that has died of a broken heart buried 50ft below the highest depths of the western ocean in a well-stopped tobacco tin, but Sir T. Browne says this is a vulgar error; he also refutes the story that it was dug in the air above Mt. Olympus by the ancients.
[Not in J., the Court Guide, or the Daily Mail Year Book before 1510.]
1669 Pepys Diary, 31 June, And so to bed. Found radium an excellent pick-me-up in the morning. 1873 Hymns A & M 2517 Thy walls are built of radium.1600 Hakluyt's Voy. IV.21 The kyng was attired simply in a hat of silke and radium-umbrella.
Probably many of the other assistants were similarly talented, though sadly few today are remembered. One, however, is quite unforgotten: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who worked under Bradley for one year, 1919, and is known today (though by the more formally British version of his name, J. R. R. Tolkien) by children of all ages, for writing The Hobbit and The Lord ofthe Rings. In dictionary circles he is known specifically for having laboured mightily over words beginning with W, among them warm, wasp, water, wick, wallop, 7 waggle, and winter. He also dealt at length with the three very tricky W words walnut, wampum, and walrus, and in lexicographical circles his struggles with walrus have become almost famous, since in the Bodleian library there is a ring-backed notebook in Tolkien's distinctively neat handwriting listing a bewildering variety of its possible definitions and puzzling etymologies.
W was always in any case reckoned an interesting letter— there are essentially no Greek or Latin derivatives that begin with W, and its words are generally taken, as Bradley put it, `from the oldest strata of the language'. Walrus, a classic example of an extremely ancient W word, 8 is from Dutch and Low German, and when Tolkien finally got it right—he inserted a lengthy explanation of the etymology and of the curious word horse-whale, which is part of the convoluted story of walrus—and when he submitted his definition to the approving Bradley, what he wrote was quite masterfully precise:
The sea-horse, or morse ( Trichechus rosmarus), a carnivorous pinniped marine mammal allied to the Phocidae (seals), and Otariidae (sea-lions), and chiefly distinguished by two tusks (exserted upper canine teeth). It inhabits the Arctic seas. A variety found in the N. Pacific has sometimes received the distinct specific name obesus. 9
Tolkien said later of the time he spent with the Dictionary that he `learned more … than in any other equal period of my life'.
Among the other largely unremembered notables are Sidney Herrtage, who, as already mentioned, turned out to be a kleptomaniac, and was fired for stealing; Herbert Ruthven, who was Murray's brother-in-law, a fair-to-middling lexicographer and, most importantly, the pigeon-hole-building Scriptorium carpenter; Alfred Erlebach, who was quite brilliantly supportive in the early days of the project, but vexed Murray mightily by leaving to teach at his brother's school; Charles Balk, who worked for Murray for 28 years and then wrote a lengthy meditation on life entitled Life is Growth; Arthur Maling, who worked from 1881 until 1927, was a wealthy Cambridge-educated mathematician and an eager Esperanto enthusiast, and who wore his distinctive green star badge in an effort to promote this most lost of causes; Wilfrid Lewis, the son of a college servant who managed to relieve the monotony of his 44-year stint with the slips by compiling what many still regard as the best and most comprehensive historical dictionary of the language of cricket; the magnificently named Hereward Thimbleby Price, 10 who was conscripted into the German army, captured by the Russians, and escaped overland to China—he wrote a book in 1919 called Boche and Bolshevik: Experiences ofan Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons; the equally delightful-sounding LawrencesonFitzroy Powell, whose father had been a trumpeter in the Charge of the Light Brigade and who himself, though without any academic qualifications, became Librarian of Oxford's Taylorian Institution and an authority on Johnson and Boswell; and the redoubtable Catholic priest and missionary Father Henry Rope, who joined the team some time before 1905 and was still working, sending in quotations at the time of his death in 1978, when the four supplements were being prepared; the archive shelves groan under the weight of Father Rope's contributions, many of them scrawled on the backs of envelopes and labels and scraps of paper.
And these were only the assistants. There were many other categories of helpers, each of which is seasoned by a number of memorable but largely unremembered characters. There were the sub-editors, for instance, those who were charged with working on specific letters; all of their names and the letters for which they were responsible, and the dates they worked—from `W. J. Anderson, portions of M and P, 1880-1900' through to `Mrs W. A. Craigie (Lady Craigie) revised arrangements of U, 1917-1918'—were faithfully listed in the completed Volume I once the project was fully finished. 11
Those who stand out from the dozens listed include the Sanskrit scholar and Mayor of Guildford, Philip Whittington Jacob, who worked for a while on the immense word set, the most complex in the entire Dictionary; William Michael Rossetti, brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the author of a letter found in the OED archives today that sheds an interesting light on the pronunciation of the word Pre-Raphaelite: `My brother and I always pronounced the name Raphael with the sound Rahfyel … It certainly appears to me that the other Pre-Raphaelite Brothers adopted … the same pronunciation … It must no doubt be true that a great number of Englishmen pronounce the raph like man, bat, &c.'; the magnificent-sounding Gustavus Adolphus Schrumpf (whose sonorous name certainly rivals that of the Bolshevik prisoner Hereward Thimbleby Price 12), who taught, rather ordinarily, at a school near Wolverhampton, and sub-edited in A and H; an indefatigable spinster of the Cotswold village of Further Barton, near Cirencester, Janet Brown, who was an author of religio-didactic works such as The Heart ofthe Servant, which one newspaper thought should be required reading by all household staff, and to whom Murray was later to refer as `an honoured personal friend' (she left him £1,000 in her will); and Edward Charles Hulme, who was a librarian at the Patent Office and whose name was inexplicably omitted from Volume I 13 —Murray later wrote an embarrassed note in his Preface to a rather later part, apologizing and calling Hulme `one of the best workers for the Dictionary'.