IN THE BEGINNING was the word, well, more than 400,000 of them. And they were good English, but their definitions were incomplete.
And so the Philological Society of London began, in 1857, one of the greatest endeavours in the English language; to chart the meanings and histories of the words and publish them in one vast book. We know that book today as the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED.
It was created over seven decades through the labour of love of thousands of people, many contributing voluntarily. James Murray, the first editor who made the dream of the London Philological Society a reality through his painstaking scholarship and organisation, is the name most closely associated with the dictionary. The most infamous is a deranged American surgeon and murderer, William Minor, who whiled away his time in an asylum for the criminally insane searching the world of literature for early uses of English vocabulary.
In what was described by British author Arnold Bennett as the longest sensational serial ever produced, the dictionary was published in instalments, starting in 1884 with the words A to Ant. It took until 1928 to reach the last word - 'zyxt' (an obsolete Kentish word meaning 'to see') - when all 10 volumes of the first edition were published.
For Oxford University Press (OUP), its publisher, it was the beginning. The prestige and expertise invested in the largest English dictionary in the world, and the one to most comprehensively record the history of the language, helped propel OUP into pole position as a publisher of dictionaries. Chambers may be preferred for Scrabble and crosswords and Longman a well-established competitor in the English learning market, but, for many, the word dictionary is synonymous with Oxford.
Oxford, which claims to have the oldest university publishing house in the world, dating back to 1478, is a natural home for dictionary-making. Lexicographers can make use of its Bodleien Library, one of the few to have copies of almost every book ever published. Many learned dons have helped in the creation and updating of the OED - J.R.R. Tolkein, for instance, provided difficult definitions for words beginning with 'W' of Scandinavian origin, such as 'walrus'. Later he could advise on the word 'hobbit'.