Product Description

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.
Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making--how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated--and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium--the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it--and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption.
The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project--a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled uber-dictionary.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108197 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With his usual winning blend of scholarship and accessible, skillfully paced narrative, Winchester (Krakatoa) returns to the subject of his first bestseller, The Professor and the Madman, to tell the eventful, personality-filled history of the definitive English dictionary. He emphasizes that the OED project began in 1857 as an attempt to correct the deficiencies of existing dictionaries, such as Dr. Samuel Johnson's. Winchester opens with an entertaining and informative examination of the development of the English language and pre-OED efforts. The originators of the OED thought the project would take perhaps a decade; it actually took 71 years, and Winchester explores why. An early editor, Frederick Furnivall, was completely disorganized (one sack of paperwork he shipped to his successor, James Murray, contained a family of mice). Murray in turn faced obstacles from Oxford University Press, which initially wanted to cut costs at the expense of quality. Winchester stresses the immensity and difficulties of the project, which required hundreds of volunteer readers and assistants (including J.R.R. Tolkien) to create and organize millions of documents: the word bondmaid was left out of the first edition because its paperwork was lost. Winchester successfully brings readers inside the day-to-day operations of the massive project and shows us the unrelenting passion of people such as Murray and his overworked, underpaid staff who, in the end, succeeded magnificently. Winchester's book will be required reading for word mavens and anyone interested in the history of our marvelous, ever-changing language.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary has been burnished into legend over the years, at least among librarians and linguists. In The Professor and the Madman (1998), Winchester examined the strange case of one of the most prolific contributors to the first edition of the OED--one W. C. Minor, an American who sent most of his quotation slips from an insane asylum. Now, Winchester takes on the dictionary's whole history, from the first attempts to document the English language in the seventeenth century, the founding of the Philological Society in Oxford in 1842, and the start of work on the dictionary in 1860; to the completion of the first edition nearly 70 years, 414,825 words, and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations later. Although there is plenty of detail here about the methodology (including the famous pigeon holes stuffed with quotations slips from contributors around the world), the emphasis is on personalities, in particular James Murray, who became the OED's third editor in 1879 and died in 1915, "well into the letter T." The project backers complained loudly about the slow pace over the years, but the scrupulous care taken by Murray and the many others who worked on the OED gave us what is arguably the world's greatest dictionary. Publication of this book coincides with the OED's seveny-fifth anniversary, even as work on the third edition is under way. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Peculiarly inspiring...And Winchester's involving and gregarious narration is nearly Dickensian. Even his footnotes twinkle." -- -Gregory Kirshchling, Entertainment Weekly

"Teeming with knowledge and alive with insights. Winchester handles humor and awe with modesty and cunning." -- -William F. Buckley, The New York Times Book Review

"This book, to get right to it, is a delight...a superb account." -- -Woody West, The Washington Times

Customer Reviews

okay
I like everything by Simon Winchester..except this book just didn't grab my interest like his others have. It is still well written and informative...but it just wasn't as appealing to me as his others.

How Could You not Like this Book
What can you say about an author who can take the history of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary, and make it not only interesting but very informative. From the original idea in 1847, to the finishing of the first edition in 1928, Winchester takes us through the trials and tribulations of those men (and some woman) who labored for years (some for over forty) to produce this amazing tome(s).

The style and attitude that brought forth this Dictionary, with over 400,000 words defined, over a period of 71 years, without giving in to those who wanted corners cut and a faster publication, is a memorial to those philologists who felts that they could only produce the 'perfect' dictionary or not produce anything. Over two million citations, some going back to Cicero and Aristotle, in order to show the changing meaning of words over the centuries was in itself an amazing accomplishment.

Winchester constantly brings in anecdotes as to how words were created and how definitions for words were hunted down by volunteers who agreed to read books printed from the time of Guttenburg forward is itself a great accomplishment. Showing the editors as not just fanatical but as human beings and family men, who all had their idiosyncracies is what makes reading this book a true pleasure. Winchester could write about the making of the telephone book interesting. Highly recommended.

Two books by Winchester on the OED: Which one to pick
The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was a huge project, far larger than I would have suspected. It took decades to prepare and used several thousand volunteers. Its leaders were men of varying abilities and eccentricities and Simon Winchester captures all of this in The Meaning of Everything. However, this book is written in a more formal language style than are some of Winchester's other books, making it a little less fun to read. This is one of the two books that Winchester has written about the creation of the OED, the other being The Professor and the Madman. The Meaning of Everything takes a more global perspective of the OED's creation, offering a greater explanation of this undertaking. The Professor and the Madman looks at the life of one unique, prolific contributor to the OED and is therefore more interesting and fun to read. If you are not interested enough in dictionaries to buy both books, then I recommend The Professor and the Madman. But this book was not as good as the other in explaining how the OED was developed, so be prepared to not understand everything. If you are sufficiently interested, or you want to have a thorough look at the development of the OED, then read The Meaning of Everything first. It doesn't reveal any information that would make The Professor and the Madman less fun to read.