Robert Burchfield, the New Zealand-born lexicographer who created the four-volume supplement to the completed OED, which appeared between 1972 and 1986. He added a further 50,000 words to the amassment of the tongue.
The books that resulted, superficially identical in design and layout to their predecessors, were composed on machines, printed lithographically and bound, not by hand as before, but on a wondrous contraption known as a No. 3 Smyth-Horne Casing-In Machine. Whole quires were sent to Tokyo and New York to be similarly assembled there. And at the same time as Oxford's printing passed from letterpress to lithography, so all the steel-andantimony printing plates that served the OED for decades past were dumped, eventually to be tossed away. A few survive: I still have, mounted in a frame, the plate for page 452 of Volume V, which encompasses the words Humoral to Humour. It was made in 1933. I would like to think that it might have been made in perhaps June 1899 and used to print sheets for the following 70 years.
In 1971, just before the publication of the first of the Supplement volumes, and to help OUP make money out of this enormous enterprise and inject some cash into Burchfield's endeavours, the entire first edition was `micrographically reproduced', its print made near-invisibly tiny so that all thirteen volumes could be compressed into two. The entire OED was thus able to be sold in one big blue box, along with a handsome magnifying glass in a nifty little drawer at the top—and it sold like hot cakes, particularly in America, where book clubs bought it at massive discounts and used it as a free gift to induce readers to join.
One major task lay ahead, however. In 1986 the language as corralled by Oxford was now arranged into not one but three parallel alphabetical lists: the main OED, the 1933 Supplement, and the four-volume Burchfield Supplement. Anyone looking for a word had of necessity to look in three different places. The OED was, in short, a mess. To make some sort of sense, all of the words, no matter how young or how old they might be, had now to be alphabetically integrated with one another, and one complete list had to be created in place of the existing three. The only way to do this—and to ensure that later expansions could take place with ease and without the need to unpick and rewrite all over again— was to take all of the original material and to recast it, from A to Zyxt, by using what in those days was a giant computer.
And so in the mid-1980s, with an enormously generous donation from IBM of computers and staff, with the work of a number of specialists at Canada's University of Waterloo in Ontario, by employing the keyboarding labours of hundreds of men and women who, in a vast warehouse in Florida, had hitherto been accustomed to the assembling of telephone directories, 4 and under the editorial supervision of two brand new co-editors, John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, the entire OED was ripped asunder, retyped, turned into binary code, and then reprinted. It came out on time in 1989 as an immense twenty-volume second edition, which defined a total of 615,100 words, and illustrated those definitions with 2,436,600 quotations. To do so took 59,000,000 words and 21,730 pages, and consumed almost 140 pounds of paper, for every single set of books.
John Simpson, the current editor of the OED, with some of his staff and their electronic versions of Murray's pigeon-hole filing systems. The third edition of the Dictionary, on which Simpson and his colleagues have been working since the 1990s, is due out some time in the early 21st century.
And though that final number might seem merely a facetiously introduced piece of trivia, it does in fact concern John Simpson, who currently edits (with Edmund Weiner as his Deputy Chief Editor) what is being called the Revised Edition. For this will truly be a monster—an OED so massive as perhaps only to be amenable to use on-line. Just as in Murray's time, no-one is precisely certain when it will be finished. It may include a million defined words. It could run to as many as forty volumes. It could weigh in at nearly a sixth of a ton, for each and every set. Each printing would consume a sizeable acreage of woodland. The environment would be affected, significantly. Would it be worthwhile? Would everyone like the comfort of knowing there was a beautiful 40-volume book out there? Or would all the world prefer the wisdom of the Dictionary to be purveyed electronically, with no physical harm to anyone or anything at all, and only the intellectual benefits deriving from all those decades of scholarship?
Such are the concerns of those who superintend the cataloguing and describing of our language today—concerns that go beyond the plain demands of learning, that so entirely consumed the lives of all those editors, sub-editors, and assistants who went before.
The pictures of those who began the OED haunt us stilclass="underline" legions of elderly, usually bearded men, formally dressed in tweeds and gabardine, sitting at high desks, pens in hand, volumes open beside them, sheaves of paper in racks and shelves and pigeonholes behind them, a heavy, cloistered atmosphere of academic rigour and polymathic knowledge enveloping and embracing them like the very air itself. Today's images are very different: the men and women are younger, they come to work dressed as they please, they spend their times in brightly lit offices, computer screens are everywhere, telephones warble, modems blink, files are transmitted across oceans in microseconds, queries of all kinds are asked and answered in an instant. And yet the sepia pictures of the times before are still around, high on the walls, talked about, pointed at, revered. It is as if they offer to the editors of today some reassurance that the task upon which they are bent is not much different in its essence from how it was when Herbert Coleridge sat down in Regent's Park, all those years before.
So different now—and yet so very much the same. `The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre,' James Murray wrote in his famous Introduction, `but no discernible circumference.' Those who worked before in London and Mill Hill, in the Scriptorium on Banbury Road and in the Old Ashmolean and on Walton Crescent, indeed found and defined the well-defined centre of the English language. That is all now safely gathered in, and for this all must be eternally grateful. Those who work today, building on these undeniable triumphs of the past, are trying now to catch and snare the indiscernible, ever outwardspreading ripples of idiom and neologism and slang and linguistic invention by which the English language expands and changes, year by year, decade by decade, century by century.
We cannot tell what the editors will be like, will look like, how their working places will be designed or defined, in another 50 years, in another century, or in the next millennium. But the English language will be there for sure. Its centre will remain static and well defined. The circumferential ripples of new-formed English words will become ever larger, ever wider, and ever less well defined: that much is certain. And what is certain too is that humans, being humans, will be on hand as well, in some way or another, as they have been for so long, to catch all these words, to list them all, and to record and fix them all in time, for always.