Defining moments

At its apogee in the late 19th century, the British Empire was an enterprise of mapping, naming, and subjugation; a project of imposing order, language, and the Union Jack upon the supposedly unruly quarter of the globe. It is tempting, then, to view the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, that grand codification of the imperial mother tongue, as its ultimate intellectual expression. Yet the paradox, so brilliantly portrayed in Sarah Ogilvie's The Dictionary People, is that while the dictionary may have been a project of empire, it was not an entirely imperial one. 
Ogilvie reveals that the method of its construction: a global appeal for words from any and all English speakers, ensured that the language of the periphery flooded the metropole. Words from Hindi, Nahuatl, and the Malay Archipelago arrived in the same postal bags as archaicisms from Yorkshire vicars. The book shows that the OED became less a monument to a pure, monolithic English than an astonishingly detailed record of its mongrelisation; an unintended confession that the language of the conqueror was, and always had been, splendidly and irreversibly conquered itself.
It is one of the more telling ironies that this monument of Oxford learning was largely built by those who stood outside the university's hallowed gates. The OED, as Ogilvie makes clear, was a project that appealed most powerfully to the autodidact and the amateur, to those who aspired to an intellectual world from which they were often excluded by class, gender, or creed. 
Its chief editor, James Murray, was a Scotsman and a nonconformist who had left school at 14 years old. His most important collaborator on dialect, Joseph Wright, was a Yorkshireman who began "wool sorting" at age nine and was illiterate at 15. Ogilvie populates her story with a host of such figures: intelligent women who were denied a university education, provincial vicars with a passion for philology, and clerks who spent their evenings meticulously transcribing quotations—who formed the bedrock of the enterprise. Their devotion often contrasted with the indifference, or simple absence, of many in the established professoriate, creating a quiet but persistent tension: a dictionary that would become the ultimate symbol of the establishment was, in fact, the masterwork of the outsiders.
The story of the OED has, of course, had its fair share of chroniclers throughout the years. Most famously, Simon Winchester has made the subject his own, first in The Surgeon of Crowthorne (Viking Press, 1998), where he fashioned a brilliant and claustrophobic miniature from the astonishing correspondence between James Murray and the murderer William Chester Minor, and later in The Meaning of Everything (Oxford University Press, 2003), his more comprehensive history of the entire undertaking. And Murray's own granddaughter, K M Elisabeth Murray, produced in Caught in the Web of Words (1977) the definitive 'great man' history, a magisterial account of the editor-in-chief's heroic struggles.

Ogilvie's contribution is of a different, and arguably more democratic, order. She does not restrain the book's limit with only the most famous or the most infamous contributors; she gives us the muster roll of the entire, sprawling regiment. Her book is made possible by a remarkable piece of archival discovery: a set of dusty address books, tied with a ribbon, containing the names of not just hundreds but some three thousand volunteer contributors. This find allows her to move beyond the single case study and present us with a full group portrait, transforming the story into a bustling, and altogether stranger, social history.
And it is a history that she writes with considerable verve and scholarly grit. Ogilvie proves a deft and sympathetic chronicler, rescuing these lives from the condescension of posterity and rendering them in their full, and often tragic, colour. The book's structure, an alphabetical tour from 'Archaeologist' to 'Zealots', might have been a mere gimmick in lesser hands. Here, it becomes a surprisingly effective cabinet of curiosities, allowing her to showcase the sheer variety of human type that was drawn to this colossal undertaking. The reader emerges from The Dictionary People with a renewed appreciation not just for the dictionary itself, but also for the idea of collaborative, unselfish, and obsessive human enterprise. Ogilvie manages her most difficult task tactfully: she demystifies a great monument without in the least diminishing its grandeur.
Ogilvie is also to be commended for her attention to the physical machinery of this pre-digital enterprise. Before the digital age, the dictionary's engine room was a custom-built iron shed in Murray's garden known as the Scriptorium. The project's central nervous system was the penny post, which ferried millions of handwritten paper slips from every corner of the empire to a special pillar box installed outside Murray's home.
Ogilvie's book is, in many respects, a study in the pathology of obsession. The sheer, grinding monomania required to fill thousands of paper slips with quotations is not a common human trait, and Ogilvie is unsparing in her depiction of the human cost. Ogilvie's work forces the reader to confront an unsettling question: was this army of volunteers driven by a pure love of language, or was the dictionary a convenient vessel for preexisting, and often self-destructive, compulsions? The evidence suggests the latter was indispensable to the success of the former.
Gustave Flaubert famously embodied the artist's agonised pursuit of le mot juste, the one perfect word, spending weeks in torturous solitude to craft a single sentence. This is the aristocratic view of language: a pristine instrument to be wielded by a solitary genius. The spirit of the Oxford English Dictionary, and of the people who fill Ogilvie's book, is its absolute antithesis. The OED is magnificently indifferent to le mot juste; its concern is with the word as it is used, whether in the high prose of a philosopher, obscure text of a collector, spoken dialect of a West of England farmer, homesteads of New Zealand, or peripheries of British India. Ogilvie has given us the definitive story of this people's lexicon, a triumph not of the lonely aesthete, but of the great democratic chorus.

Najmus Sakib studies Linguistics at the University of Dhaka. Reach him on X at @sakib221b.