Simon Winchester: The Meaning of Everything

Reviewed by PETER CALDER


He studied geology (at Oxford, of course) and worked as a foreign correspondent, but now the prolific Simon Winchester contents himself with writing books somewhat faster than I can read them. In an airport bookshop last month I saw two of his titles I'd never heard of and his history of the Krakatoa eruption sits unread on my bedside table, glaring reprovingly.

His latest, however, demanded immediate attention. Subtitled The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, it takes its name from that project's noble ambition: to provide a "full-length, illustrated biography" of every word - in use, archaic and obsolete - in the English language.

The undertaking that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin called "the greatest enterprise of its kind in history" has engrossed Winchester before. His biggest seller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (published in the United States as The Professor and the Madman) concerned the prodigious contribution to the OED of William Minor, a American killer incarcerated in a Berkshire asylum.

Minor's story takes a mere six pages of this volume, which details the genesis of the world's most comprehensive dictionary from conception to birth.

It was, by any standards, a difficult gestation: 68 years and three weeks elapsed between the idea and its fruition in 1928, and the project was 18 years old before the man the world knows as the editor, James Augustus Henry Murray, came on board.

Murray warned it would take 10 years to get the job done. In the end, it took 50 and the great man died while working on the last of the letter "T". But he had ensured the accomplishment of an ambition which dwarfed its predecessors: Samuel Johnson had defined 43,000 words, the American Noah Webster 70,000; the first OED listed 414,825 words in 286km of type, showing usages with around 1.8 million citations.

Winchester takes us through those 68 years with loving attention to entertaining detail, but without losing the story's momentum.

He ensures we understand the dictionary's ambition to be descriptive - to show how the language is and has been used, rather than prescribe what ought to happen. He also takes us deep into the murky and entertaining politics involved in the venture, exploring, for example, the publisher's unease at the editor's prediction that the dictionary would be "far more enormous than one would suppose could possibly sell".

His love for his subject is evident, his style is light and lucid. He slices through lexicographical thickets with gusto and exuberance and mixes tidbits - "set", which commands 24 pages of the dictionary, is the language's busiest word; Shakespeare invented the useful "accommodation" and the less enduring "soilure" and "vastidity" - with a wider view.

More comprehensive endnotes would have provided good background without interrupting the flow: how do we know that the libidinous Frederick Furnivall, one of Murray's many predecessors, inspired the character of Ratty in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows?

But Winchester has crafted an excellently readable book about one of the enduring monuments of English culture.

Publisher: Oxford

Price: $42.95

* Peter Calder is the author of Travels With My Mother