In July 1915, sick James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had devoted 36 years to the dictionary. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for " twilight" .
The story of Murray' s final days is one of many memorable tales in " The Dictionary People" . Conceived (构思) in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project comprising 3,000 people. The idea was to create a " descriptive" dictionary that tracked words' use and meaning over time. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how " rare, old-fashioned, new" words were used. What is surprising about this random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.
The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie' s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, an editor for the OED, went into the archives (档案馆) of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. " The Dictionary People" is her work of detective scholarship, presenting the lives behind the names.
The dictionary' s contributors are an engaging cast, including one of Karl Marx' s daughters and J. R. R. Tolkien. For some, the dictionary was something addictive: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations. Murray, too, was assiduous. He once wrote to George Eliot to ask about a word choice in " Romola" , published 17 years earlier.
Ms Ogilvie' s book is full of strange but interesting tales. Many dictionary lovers engaged in another crowdsourcing fashion: collecting and measuring rainwater. The presentation of the book is irregular, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. For example, in her first chapter, " A for Archaeologist (考古学家)," she relates the early life of Margaret A. Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist. There are 26 alphabetical (按字母顺序排列的) chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors. This is a clever concept.
