Four centuries of definitions
Robert Cawdrey: Table Alphabeticall (1604)
Samuel Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
Noah Webster: American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)
Oxford English Dictionary (1928)
OEB third edition, draft entry (December 2001)
And so in due course all these modern words were included, and the histories of both these and scores of words which deserved more amplification or explication—or which had evolved new meaning in the years between—were duly inscribed. Most related to technologies that had not even been imagined when Coleridge and Furnivall sat down to work, as Craigie wrote—words connected to biochemistry, wireless telegraphy and telephony, mechanical transport, aerial locomotion, psycho-analysis, the cinema. In the end, 867 pages accommodated them all. The inclusions began with the use of the letter A to denote the highest attainable mark given in American schools (the phrase straight A is there as welclass="underline" 1897 for the first use of A, 1926 for straight A). And they ended with the word zooming, defined as `making or accompanied by a humming or buzzing sound', and first noted in a July edition of Blackwood's Magazine in 1923.
The word pacifist is in the Supplement too. Some critics had earlier written of their disappointment in discovering that `though of decent parentage and respectable antiquity' it was a word that for some mysterious and perhaps politically sinister reason `found no place in the OED'. But the truth was far simpler: the word had simply not been quoted in any published material until the year 1906—even though pacify had been around since the fifteenth century and pacific since the sixteenth. The notion that Murray had overlooked it because quotations that included pacifist were destroyed with the other Pa slips in the southern Irish barn does not stand up: lexicographers have scoured the literature ever since, and it is an Edwardian neologism, pure and simple.
African was in the Supplement, now that Murray had taken his hostility to the word with him to the grave. The forlornly misplaced bondmaid was there, its slips having been found lurking under a pile of books in the Scriptorium long after the B volume had gone to press. Television was there (in the 1928 edition it was too, but with the caveat `not yet perfected'). Radio was fleshed out (earlier there had been merely a passing reference, taken from TitBits, to a Mr Marconi and `his radio or coherer', which transmitted wireless telegraphy). And radium was properly included too—`a rare metallic element … Curie … 1898 … atomic number 88'. Nary a mention of tobacco tins or squint-eyed rats; nothing untoward had crept into the definition.
The only notable omission is not a word, but a listing in the Preface: for the first time since 1884 there is no mention anywhere of either Miss Edith or Miss E. P. Thompson, of Liverpool, Reigate, and Bath. The Dictionary had outlived them, as it would eventually outlive all who helped to make it. And as it always will.
And so there, with its thirteen majestic, gold-blocked dark blue cloth and clotted-cream-coloured paper-covered volumes, the Oxford English Dictionary duly stood guard over the tongue for the next 40 years. It had taken 76 years and had cost £375,000 to get to this point—though nobody at Oxford had a real idea of what the monetary figures really meant: overheads had never been included, and the value of money had changed beyond all reason. The Dictionary was no money-spinner, that was for sure—the coincidence of the Supplement's publication with the Great Depression limited still further any sales which might optimistically have been predicted.
The new Delegates' wonderfully old-fashioned Secretary, R. W. Chapman—a man who never rode in a car nor ever used a typewriter or a fountain pen—ordered up 10,000 sets of the complete Dictionary in 1935. It was supposed they would endure for all time, and there would never be the need to print again. At the outbreak of the war in 1939 there were 6,000 of them left, and it was thought that if the worst came to the worst they could be used as some kind of air raid shelter, at least as efficacious as sandbags and, for Oxford people, rather more suitable.
Once the debris of war had been cleared away and the dreaming leisure of peace began to settle back onto Oxford, the single admitted deficiency of the OED, one common to any dictionary of English—the fact that it was always bound to be out of date— was addressed once more. A further clutch of supplements were planned, this time under the editorship of a genially energetic New Zealander, Robert Burchfield, who took a suite of nondescript offices in a house near to the Press, in Walton Crescent, and eventually installed eighteen staff members there. One formal picture of the team, taken in the same style and the same place (the main quadrangle of the Press) as all the formal pictures of Murray's and Bradley's and Craigie's teams before—shows, in the front row, one `Mr. J. P. Barnes'. Rarely does an OED man become a celebrity beyond his own rather crabbed field of endeavour: but, as Julian Barnes, this particular young editorial assistant was soon to emerge from the harmless drudgery of lexicography to become one of Britain's most celebrated essayists and novelists.
Burchfield's four-volume Supplement, assembled from the vast hoard of words that scattered members of the Dictionary team had been gathering all the while 2 —and which tried to make sense of the vocabulary havoc that was being played by some authors, James Joyce most notable among them—came out at four-year intervals, the first in 1972, the last, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II, in 1986. Charles Onions 3 was still alive, and helped Burchfield until the mid-1960s. In the end, 50,000 words were added— including (as Burchfield wrote in his final Preface to Volume IV) several which their creators helped to define: Anthony Powell, for example, helped with acceptance world, A. J. Ayer with drogulus, Buckminster Fuller with Dymaxion, J. R. R. Tolkien—a former assistant and walrus expert—with hobbit, and the cosmologist Murray Gell-Mann with quark. Psychedelic, coined in 1957, but popular at the time that Volume III was being printed, made it, just in time.