MAMMOTH WORK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 June 1940, Page 2

MAMMOTH WORK

THE OXFORD DICTIONARY.

They say, and one can well believe it. that the great Oxford Dictionary contains 24.000.000 words, or over 30 times as many words as there are in the Bible It contains 500,000 definitions, illustrated by 2,000.600 quotations. If the type used to print it were laid down on the road it would reach from London to Manchester. It took over 50 years to compile, and during that time 1300 people ransacked old and new books, newspapers, and magazines to discover new words and phrases in the bud. When they found one they wrote it on a slip and posted it to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Thirty sub-editors working there took their bundles of slips every morning. classified them, pigeonholed them, scrapped some, and amplified others, and before they went home at night had added a few more inches to that leaden line that stretches from London to Manchester.

Some expert readers were given special tasks. One concentrated on Chaucer, another on Langland, another on Spenser, and so on. The mere list of books read under instruct tions and quoted fills 88 large pages of small type. The whole realm of English literature was explored to feed the dictionary. Men grew grey and died in its service. Once the whole staff laboured for nine months on one word alone. The word was “set,” and if you turn it up in the dictionary today you will find it occupies 22 pages and two and a-half columns, without any of its compounds. At the Ashmolean they are inclined to smile at figures like these. They are too intent on overtaking the language to look back along the road they have travelled. And yet they know they can never overtake it. For a language grows by stealth in the night.

President Wilson once used the expression “the acid test,” and a phrase which was heard only in the laboratory took wings and flew to the ends of the earth. Dean Inge spoke of “bungaloid growths.” Mr Asquith originated. “flscalities,” Sir Auckland Geddes resurrected “definitive,” Sir Herbert Samuel invented “Summertime.” a leader writer found a new use for the word “gesture.” And the sub-editors of the Ashmolean grew anxious, and look at each other with a mild surprise, and said “Too late. The A’s and the B’s (or whatever the letter may be) went to press yesterday. It’s too late to do anything now.”