The Professor And The Madman

Beginning with the official OED entry for the word “Sesquipedalian,” which means the use of long words, Chapter 4 is a brief history of English-language dictionaries. As the Philological Society met at the London Library in 1857 to put the wheels in motion for the OED’s creation, speaker Dr. Richard Chenevix Trench, a cleric and dean of Westminster, believed that English was the dominant language around the world and its spread furthered the worldwide growth of Christianity. Trench told his audience that the few dictionaries that existed “suffered from a number of serious shortcomings—grave deficiencies from which both the language and—by implication—the empire and its church might well eventually come to suffer” (79-80).

English dictionaries published in the 17th century focused primarily on “hard” or unusual words, failing to encompass the language in its entirety. In the middle of the 18th century, as “English was trembling on the verge of becoming a global […] vehicle for the conduct of international commerce, arms, and law” (87), Samuel Johnson created A Dictionary of the English Language, which consisted of 43,500 headwords and 118,000 illustrative quotations. Winchester argues that “its publication represented a pivotal moment in the history of the English language; the only more significant moment was to commence almost exactly a century later” (90).