![]() ![]() Each volunteer was assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. In 1879, he launched the great “Appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading public,” which ultimately attracted millions of quotation slips. Murray had a prodigious capacity for hard work. 3įrom the start, the massive scale of the project was evident and the help of volunteer amanuenses to find and copy words and quotations was required. ![]() On 26 April 1878, Murray was invited to meet the delegates of the Oxford University Press, who appointed him editor from 1879 until his death from pleurisy in 1915. The august Murray stood out as a long-bearded, “unconventionally attired man in corduroy trousers, with a tie of pink ribbon, having the most strikingly twinkling brown eyes. a He was appointed in 1869 to the Council of the Philological Society, which was filled with frock-coated members. He worked in a London bank but in his spare time became an accomplished self-taught linguist and etymologist. Remarkably, his schooling ended at the age of fourteen. ![]() He was the eldest son of a clothier, proud to be a hardy, independent Borderer. Murray (Figs 2 & 3) was born in Denholm near Hawick in the southern uplands of Teviotdale. If ever a lexicographer merited the adjective iconic, it must surely be James Augustus Henry Murray. Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915) In the 1870s, Furnival secured the assistance of James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915), a Scottish teacher at Hawick Grammar School, lexicographer, and philologist. The main early contributors included philologists and lexicographers, notably Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall. It started as the works of the Philological Society of London. The OED began in 1857, and by 1884 was published in unbound fascicles as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. ![]() 1 In 1828, Noah Webster published his two-volume masterpiece, titled An American Dictionary of the English Language, now Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. Many more specialized dictionaries with diverse lexical foci were to follow. It is the principal historical dictionary of the English language. The 2005 version contains approximately 301,100 main entries and 2,412,400 usage quotations. In the nineteenth century, The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) published by Oxford University Press (OUP) filled that gap. Johnson defined a Lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”Īs the English language expanded and incorporated words and phrases from distant lands, there was an absence of any comprehensive dictionary. The most famous was Samuel Johnson’s A dictionary of the English language, 1755 (Fig 1) containing two volumes and 118,000 illustrative quotations, which aimed to replace Dictionarium Britannicum of Nathan Bailey (1730). A New English Dictionary was an important advance reflecting everyday language compiled by the first professional lexicographer, John Kersey the Younger, in 1702. Johnson’s Dictionary Īfter the first dictionary of English words (Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical… 1604) many dictionaries aimed to provide typical spelling, meaning, and often pronunciation, etymology, synonyms, and quotations. William Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary June 8, 2021įig 1. ![]()
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