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jmrprice's review against another edition
3.0
A delightful story of the undertakings to develop the massive OED, with side journeys covering other attempts and multiple editors and significant contributors. For me, this story illuminated the fact that simple does not equal easy… the original vision had a limited timeframe and publication length to complete the endeavor - both which exploded as the complexity of the project covered years (decades!) and millions and millions of hours effort from slews of contributors from around the globe. The English language is fascinating from many different aspects.
Consumed as an audiobook read by the author.
Consumed as an audiobook read by the author.
outcolder's review against another edition
4.0
Gotta love those wild lexicographers. A stimulating portrait of the Big Dict.
ameyawarde's review against another edition
5.0
I love micro-histories/thing-biographies, so I was already positively predisposed to this book before I started, and it didn't disappoint. It was a fairly quick and interesting read, leaving me with a lasting impression of how lucky it was that the Oxford Press accepted that this was a big, important work, and to not require it to be immediately monetarily profitable to continue the work! And, of course, Kudos to Murray for making sure that the project stayed exacting and thorough, even though it took so many decades to do. I had no idea how long, or how many hundreds of people contributed so many thousands of quotes to the project, it's no wonder at all that it took so long to compile! This is a good read for anyone interested in history or language!
lauriestein's review against another edition
4.0
A little excessively hagiographical, but the bookjacket doesn't lie - Winchester is the master of the graceful transition and engaging digression. One does wish that the female contributors to the OED were a little more fleshed out. But I'm an easy sell for books about books.
stevenyenzer's review against another edition
3.0
Having read and only somewhat remembered The Professor and the Madman -- which Winchester apparently wrote earlier and tells a zoomed-in account of OED Editor James Murray and his clinically insane contributor, Dr. W.C. Minor -- I found The Meaning of everything to be an interesting if not always exciting account of the creation of the OED.
It was wonderful to think about the fluidity of English in Victorian England and just how much mental labor was required to create the first truly complete dictionary. I wonder how many such "purely academic" endeavors would keep their research funding for six decades today.
It was wonderful to think about the fluidity of English in Victorian England and just how much mental labor was required to create the first truly complete dictionary. I wonder how many such "purely academic" endeavors would keep their research funding for six decades today.
mrjsparks's review against another edition
4.0
As engaging as a history of the English dictionary can be. Excellent reveal of what a massive undertaking this was.
millennial_dandy's review
5.0
"I am a nobody [...] Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether."
So spake Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, a key and, as it turns out, much beloved figure in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and not, in fact, a nobody at all.
And yet, this quote illustrates, in a way, how I, and I reckon many others too, think of the people who write the dictionary (if we think of them at all). The dictionary is just a thing that exists, and surely has always existed. Like gravity.
Imagine my surprise that this isn't in fact the case. The dictionary had to be conceived of, then painstakingly put together, and all (gasp) without the internet!
So what did people do before you could google 'what is a balm-cricket?' or look it up in one of those books that didn't always exist purely to populate the bookcases in period films?
They wrote to Lord Tennyson to ask him, of course! Which Murray did: "I write [...] to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it." (p.146)
'The Meaning of Everything' was probably the biggest surprise of the year for me, a 5-star read slipping in just under the wire for 2022.
At the time of its publication in 2003, the New York Times Book Review described it as 'supremely readable', going on to say: "The Meaning of Everything is teeming with knowledge and alive with insights. Winchester handles humor and awe with modesty and cunning."
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Author Simon Winchester's enthusiasm for the subject oozes out of every sentence, and by the time I finished it I was amazed that he'd managed to tell a complex story that spans near 100 years into 250 incredibly engaging and often hilarious bite-sized pages.
The first chapter alone is a delight, in which Winchester brings us through the history of the English language and the etymology of such words as 'sock' and 'they, them, and their'. It gives us a nice flavor of what all went on among the lexicographers as they tried to wrestle the English language into submission in Murray's scriptorium.
It's also here that he shows his hand and admits (as any decent linguist would) that English, like any language, being joyfully descriptive, has always been and always will be impossible to pin down by even the staunchest of prescriptivists:
And there's joy in that.
Much later, when he writes of J.R.R. Tolkien's work on the OED, Winchester reminds us that it's this wonderful fluidity that allows for such words as 'hobbit' to enter the dictionary and keep what Samuel Johnson described as a 'terrible undertow of words' flowing and the language alive and healthy.
But though these sections early on are fascinating in their own right, when we kick off the start of the project that would become the OED, Winchester shifts gears towards highlighting the exceptionally colorful and eccentric (mostly) men who undertook what would turn out to be a lifetime of trying to get a monster of a book into the hands and homes of English speakers worldwide.
But rest assured: there are still fun morsels of information on specific words scattered throughout (apparently 'walrus' was a toughie).
I'd highly, highly recommend this book to anyone with even the most fleeting curiosity about how a dictionary is birthed, and by whom this one was brought into the world, and certainly to anyone who, like me, considers themselves an amateur bibliophile.
I know I saw myself in our central hero, Murray:
"The fact that so many of the B words had been wholly unfamiliar [...] tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate." (p.178)
What true lover of language wouldn't have done the same in his place?
And Murray is just one in the tapestry of characters. We also get to learn of "George Perkins Marsh [...] the man who introduced the camel to the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced)" (p.212), and of William Chester Minor who is credited as one of the 'most celebrated of the volunteers' who worked for 21 years documenting early uses of key words from his cell at a sanitarium. And many, many more.
'The Meaning of Everything' will make you want to become a lexicographer or one of the volunteer readers who submit quotations for use in future editions of the OED. At the very least, it will bring you joy to know that at one time, this was the quote used to define 'radium':
So spake Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, a key and, as it turns out, much beloved figure in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and not, in fact, a nobody at all.
And yet, this quote illustrates, in a way, how I, and I reckon many others too, think of the people who write the dictionary (if we think of them at all). The dictionary is just a thing that exists, and surely has always existed. Like gravity.
Imagine my surprise that this isn't in fact the case. The dictionary had to be conceived of, then painstakingly put together, and all (gasp) without the internet!
So what did people do before you could google 'what is a balm-cricket?' or look it up in one of those books that didn't always exist purely to populate the bookcases in period films?
They wrote to Lord Tennyson to ask him, of course! Which Murray did: "I write [...] to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it." (p.146)
'The Meaning of Everything' was probably the biggest surprise of the year for me, a 5-star read slipping in just under the wire for 2022.
At the time of its publication in 2003, the New York Times Book Review described it as 'supremely readable', going on to say: "The Meaning of Everything is teeming with knowledge and alive with insights. Winchester handles humor and awe with modesty and cunning."
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Author Simon Winchester's enthusiasm for the subject oozes out of every sentence, and by the time I finished it I was amazed that he'd managed to tell a complex story that spans near 100 years into 250 incredibly engaging and often hilarious bite-sized pages.
The first chapter alone is a delight, in which Winchester brings us through the history of the English language and the etymology of such words as 'sock' and 'they, them, and their'. It gives us a nice flavor of what all went on among the lexicographers as they tried to wrestle the English language into submission in Murray's scriptorium.
It's also here that he shows his hand and admits (as any decent linguist would) that English, like any language, being joyfully descriptive, has always been and always will be impossible to pin down by even the staunchest of prescriptivists:
And though George Orwell might have longed for an Anglo-Saxon revival, though John Dryden loathed French loanwords, despite Joseph Addison's campaigns against contractions such as mayn't and won't, and although Alexander Pope pleaded for the retention of dignity and Daniel Defoe wrote of his hatred of the 'inundation' of curse-words and Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to 'fix our language forever' -- no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. p.29
And there's joy in that.
Much later, when he writes of J.R.R. Tolkien's work on the OED, Winchester reminds us that it's this wonderful fluidity that allows for such words as 'hobbit' to enter the dictionary and keep what Samuel Johnson described as a 'terrible undertow of words' flowing and the language alive and healthy.
But though these sections early on are fascinating in their own right, when we kick off the start of the project that would become the OED, Winchester shifts gears towards highlighting the exceptionally colorful and eccentric (mostly) men who undertook what would turn out to be a lifetime of trying to get a monster of a book into the hands and homes of English speakers worldwide.
But rest assured: there are still fun morsels of information on specific words scattered throughout (apparently 'walrus' was a toughie).
I'd highly, highly recommend this book to anyone with even the most fleeting curiosity about how a dictionary is birthed, and by whom this one was brought into the world, and certainly to anyone who, like me, considers themselves an amateur bibliophile.
I know I saw myself in our central hero, Murray:
"The fact that so many of the B words had been wholly unfamiliar [...] tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate." (p.178)
What true lover of language wouldn't have done the same in his place?
And Murray is just one in the tapestry of characters. We also get to learn of "George Perkins Marsh [...] the man who introduced the camel to the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced)" (p.212), and of William Chester Minor who is credited as one of the 'most celebrated of the volunteers' who worked for 21 years documenting early uses of key words from his cell at a sanitarium. And many, many more.
'The Meaning of Everything' will make you want to become a lexicographer or one of the volunteer readers who submit quotations for use in future editions of the OED. At the very least, it will bring you joy to know that at one time, this was the quote used to define 'radium':
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 (p. 205)
nearside's review against another edition
2.0
Most of the good stuff I'd already gleaned from his previous and related book, The Professor and the Madman, which I think is the more compelling tale relating to the creation of the OED.