Bradley, Craigie, and Onions then consolidated themselves in the Old Ashmolean Building, and left those at Sunnyside to suffer the peace of their bereavement. From now on, the large, manycolumned building beside the Sheldonian was to be the headquarters of the OED, and for the first time since 1885, the word `Scriptorium' would cease to appear in the prefaces to the parts that still emerged, now at an ever-increasing rate. There was something of a delay in production in the aftermath of Henry Bradley's death in 1923; but the pace of dictionary-making quickened again soon after, and it did not noticeably falter when Craigie was appointed Professor of English at the University of Chicago: the preface to the letter U, indeed, is datelined Chicago, and Craigie worked happily in his office in Hyde Park until the book, no matter that it was 5,000 miles to the east of him, was finished. Craigie `bestrode the Atlantic like a colossus', it was said.
The last sections positively tumbled out. As it happened, the alphabetically ultimate section XYZ—with its final word, zyxt, the last word in the entire Dictionary—was not the last to be made. Because it was so short and relatively easy it was completed seven years before the end, on 6 October 1921, under the editorship of Onions (and once again with the help, according to the Preface, of the redoubtable Thompson sisters). An earlier section, W-Wash, prepared by Bradley, was published on the very same day, giving subscribers a surprise bonus.
The year 1923 saw the appearance of Wash-Wavy and Wh-Whisking. Unforeseeing-Unright and Whisky-Wilfulness came in 1924. There was nothing—because of Bradley's passing—in 1925. The following year came Unright-Uzzle and Wilga-Wise. There was, once again, nothing published in 1927.
But on the historic afternoon of 19 April 1928, under the supervisory imprimatur of Chicago's Professor William Craigie, the final part, the 64 pages that contained the few hundreds of words that lay between Wise and Wyzen, was completed. And with the inclusion of (it has to be said) the rather disagreeable-looking and unfortunate-sounding word wyzen, which is an obscure Scottish form of the long obsolete and equally unattractive word weasand, which in some circles once meant the oesophagus or gullet, the throat or the windpipe, the work was finished.
The OED was finally and fully made. The English language, in what was at the time believed to be its entirety, had at long last been fixed between the hard covers of—at first ten and then, after a reprinting, a dozen—tombstone-sized volumes; and the labour of making it all, the work of the 71 years that had been taken up by this most magnificent and romantic of enterprises, was now all done. The triumphant moment that Trench and Coleridge and Furnivall and Murray—and Gell and Hart and Minor and Fitzedward Hall and the Thompson sisters besides—had all so longed for had been well and truly reached. Samuel Johnson, literature's Great Cham and the true father of English lexicography, had once remarked on the human creation of words, compared with the divine creation of the things they described. He had put it more elegantly: that words were the daughters of earth, while things were the sons of heaven. With the finishing of the OED, it could now fairly be said that all of earth's daughters, so very long sought, had now been brought safely to their home.
What happened next—in the weeks after completion in April, and before Stanley Baldwin's great celebration dinner on Derby Day in June—was all down to the obsessions of one of those curious and eccentric figures who lurk in the woodwork of England and Oxford, and of whose strange endeavours we are all mightily delighted to learn. This particular figure was named R. M. Leonard, and for the previous many years he had been carefully watching the growth of the Dictionary, keeping silent track of its progress and noting down, most significantly, all of the numbers.
Leonard was a newspaperman, who until 1896 had worked on the Pall Mall Gazette. He was also a first-class composer of occasional verse, rather better than the poetasters of the day; he was an anthologist; and he was an active and prominent member of the Anti-Bribery and Corruption League. Henry Frowde, the august Publisher to the University, had spotted him as an interesting kind of cove, and had hired him to edit, from London, a brand-new sixteen-page quarterly journal about the doings of the Press, which Frowde thought, in a flash of what now would be called public relations genius, ought to be called The Periodical.
Complete first ten-volume set of the OED
The paper was duly made and sent out free of charge and postage paid—`With Mr. Henry Frowde's Compliments'—to anyone who expressed an interest. And as a small sign of the beneficence of the Press there was a charming rubric sentence on the front of every issue: `The Periodical is printed on one side of the paper only, for the convenience of those who may care to take extracts from its pages.'
And within, a perpetual gallimaufry of delights. We learn, for instance, about Oxford India Paper, used for Bibles and prayer books. It was first made in the Potteries, from rope, and was used in the factories for wrapping up china. The Oxford paper mill at Wolvercote then started making it, and soon astonished Press men were proudly showing off its extraordinary strength—a threeinch-wide strip could support a load of a quarter of a hundredweight, one sheet could support an entire volume of 1,500 pages, and when rubbed hard it turned into something like chamois leather and could be used for cleaning windows. One blesses Mr Leonard for telling us such things.
As we bless him most relevantly here for painstakingly working out and then telling us, in a 1900 issue of The Periodical, some of the OED's early statistics. Back then the Dictionary had only reached I (though it lacked the words between Graded and Gyzzarn, which had not then been published). And yet, if all the columns thus far made were piled on top of one another they would be four times as high as Snowdon, the Welsh mountain, fourteen times the height of the Eiffel Tower, and would reach around the Reading Room of the British Museum almost 100 times. Moreover, the OED was very cheap indeed: for one penny piece the purchaser receives `1 yard 1 foot and 8 odd inches of solid printed matter, 2½ inches wide, on unexceptionable paper, turned out in the best manner of the University Press'.
In 1928 R. M. Leonard was still there, eagle-eyed and eager to celebrate. By then Henry Frowde had long retired, 8 and the triumphal issue of The Periodical came `With Mr. Humphrey Milford's Compliments' instead. From its pages we learn that what Arnold Bennett had called `the longest sensational serial ever written' contained, as mentioned in the Prologue, no fewer than 414,825 headwords and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations; Mr. Leonard had calculated that, even when leaving out every full stop and colon and comma, there were 227,779,589 letters and numbers in the finished work. The total amount of type used would stretch 178 miles, the distance from London to the suburbs of Manchester.
The man who printed this magisterial work, the man fortunate enough to enjoy the practical side of the lexicographical triumph, was John deMonins Johnson, the then 44-year-old former papyrologist with the Egyptian Civil Service, who had been Printer to the University since 1925. Together with the famous Oxford Lectern Bible, designed by the legendary Bruce Rogers, the OED was the most signal achievement in the career of a man who, like so many in this story, was remarkable in myriad ways.