Murray set the academic standard and shepherded the fledgling work through the bureaucracy of Oxford University Press, juggling the competing goals of maintaining excellence with the demands to publish quickly. Murray combined academic brilliance with the drive, vision, and organizational skills of a modern-day entrepreneur. Murray was the perfect man for the job of compiling this dictionary from scratch-and it was essentially from scratch, the previous two editors, Herbert Coleridge, tubercular grandson of the poet, and Frederick Furnivall, an excellent scholar who let his passion for women distract him from the work at hand, had accomplished little. The central figure in the creation of the OED is James Murray, the editor from 1879 until his death in 1915. The cataloging of the English language was truly a massive task and one done without automation or modern information processing tools. At the height of the project, readers were submitting quotations at a rate of 1,000 per day. It contains 414,825 headwords and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. (And with supplements, a second edition, and with the beginning of a third, the work has never stopped.) The first edition is 15,490 pages long in twelve volumes. The idea of a comprehensive dictionary of the English language was first put forward in 1857 and the first edition was not completed until 1928. The first edition of the dictionary took over 70 years to complete. The monumental achievement of this dictionary is demonstrated by some simple statistics. (Although it was not completed until 1928, the OED is essentially a Victorian work.) It is also a story of bureaucratic and academic infighting and about how books get published. The creation of the OED was one of the monumental achievements of the Victorian age. While the story of the OED is not one of high drama or cracking adventure, The Meaning of Everything is a book of great interest to anyone interested in words and lexicography. The book was suggested to Winchester by the editors at Oxford University Press and is based on the research Winchester conducted for his 1998 book. This latest is something of an unofficial history of the OED. In 1998 he wrote The Professor and the Madman (British title: The Surgeon of Crowthorne) and has now penned The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Simon Winchester has been making something of a career of late writing books about the Oxford English Dictionary.
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