A Brill Calendar: February 7

Musings on Lexicography

Few disciplines serving scholarship can be traced back to one genius. See, for instance: ‘lexicography’, sturdy matriarch of the dynasty currently ruled by Google.

Where to start? Perhaps best with the Doctor of all Anglo-Saxon Doctors: Samuel Johnson, that tireless, red-blooded and warm-hearted Englishman; although that endearing giant stood on the shoulders of a mixed lot of dwarfs and penmen below his stature when he published his ‘Dictionary’ in print.

Where to continue? Perhaps best with a wizened Scot, James Augustus Henry Murray (Denholm, Roxburghshire, Scotland, February 7 1837 – Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, July 26 1915), teaching English for some thirty years, until 1885, at grammar school level; until his sensational article on the mother-tongue for the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ made him famous in 1878; and President of the Philological Society as well.

In 1879, he became editor of ‘A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles’; a grandiose venture eventually called ‘The Oxford English Dictionary’ after its printing at the Oxford Clarendon Press. Murray’s ‘finest hour’ began in 1884, in his early fifties; and would last a little more than thirty years, until his death. After the first decade of that Herculean task, Murray was knighted. What he endeavoured to create was an comprehensive survey of each and every word used in English since the Crusading Era and occasionally earlier; based on strict descriptive and historical principles. Murray designed an unprecedented and lasting organizational method & structure for this immense effort.

Lexicography came into its own far before digital electronic devices could comprise and access whole libraries. Whosoever ponders antique photographs of the old bearded gentleman, who seems nigh short of drowning in an analogue ocean of documents crammed into his work-shop; looks into a dream of a true scholar. When he died, half his task was completed.