#lexicographer

February 7th 1837 saw the birth of James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A couple of things that I love about this, 1; a Scot was the first editor of the most famous English dictionary, a 2; the picture of Murray, he just looks the part!

He was certainly something of a prodigy as a child, despite his humble background. Born in the Borders village of Denholm, near Hawick, the son of a tailor, he reputedly knew his alphabet by the time he was eighteen months old, and was soon showing a precocious interest in other languages, including—at the age of 7—Chinese.

Thanks to his voracious appetite for reading, and what he called ‘a sort of mania for learning languages’, he was already a remarkably well-educated boy by the time his formal schooling ended, at the age of 14, with a knowledge of French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek, oh and of course Gaelic, along with a range of other interests, including botany, geology, and archaeology. After a few years teaching in local schools—he was evidently a born teacher, and was made a headmaster at the age of 21—he moved to London, and took work in a bank.

e soon began to attend meetings of the London Philological Society, and threw himself into the study of dialect and pronunciation—an interest he had already developed while still in Scotland—and also of the history of English. In 1870 an opening at Mill Hill School, just outside London, enabled him to return to teaching. He began studying for an external London BA degree, which he finished in 1873, the same year as his first big scholarly publication, a study of Scottish dialects which was widely recognized as a pioneering work in its field and was the first ever sustained history of the Scots tongue.

Only a year later his linguistic research had earned him his first honorary degree, a doctorate from Edinburgh University: quite an achievement for a self-taught man of 37.

In 1876 Murray was approached by the London publishers Macmillans about the possibility of editing a dictionary, he accepted the challenged and it was generally thought the publication would take around ten years to complete and run to 6,400 pages, in four volumes, he undertook the work while still teaching at Mill Hill, although he did enlist help in several assistants.

Five years later- no- he hadn’t finished it, he was a genius but not that much, they published the first volume, A-Ant, to steal the words from a future film, they were going to need a bigger book!“ The team sent out the call for volunteers all across the country. one American man, William Chester Minor, even responded from his prison cell in Broadmoor while serving a life sentence for murder. still suffered from paranoid delusions, some saw his work on the Oxford English Dictionary as a form of therapy. Minor became a regular collaborator with Murray as he sent his notes to the editor every week for 20 years. Every letter Minor signed with the closing, “Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire.

Murray soon had to give up his school teaching, and moved to Oxford in 1885; even then progress was too slow, and eventually three other Editors were appointed, each with responsibility for different parts of the alphabet. Although for more than three-quarters of the time he worked on the OED there were other Editors working alongside him—he eventually died in 1915—and although he had a staff of assistants helping him, it is without question that he was the Editor of the Dictionary.

It was not until 1928 that C. T. Onions and William Craigie finally finished the main text. In terms of the methodology he developed, The Oxford English Dictionary is largely Murray’s creation; as the ‘Historical Introduction’ to the OED states, ‘to Murray belongs the credit for giving it, at the outset, a form which proved to be adequate to the end’.

In his private life Murray married an Ada Agnes Ruthven and they found time to have 11 children together, all of whom reached adulthood, and unusual occurrence back then. Some even helped him in the compilation of the OED. The third pic is great and shows him astride a huge ‘sand-monster’ constructed on the beach during one of the family’s holidays in North Wales.

An interesting article about a very extensive Latin dictionary in the New York Times. Excerpt: 

When German researchers began working on a new Latin dictionary in the 1890s, they thought they might finish in 15 or 20 years.

In the 125 years since, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.L.) has seen the fall of an empire, two world wars and the division and reunification of Germany. In the meantime, they are up to the letter R.

This is not for lack of effort. Most dictionaries focus on the most prominent or recent meaning of a word; this one aims to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600. The dictionary’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, who died in 1908, described entries in the T.L.L. not as definitions, but “biographies” of words.

The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too.

Dictionaries sound so authoritative it can be difficult sometimes to imagine that they are written by real people. One of the people who make dictionaries happen is Jane Solomon. Jane’s lexicography work has also taken her into the world of emoji, and now picture books. Jane is on Twitter (@janesolomon), and blogs at Lexical items. She also has a book out April 30th 2019 The Dictionary of Difficult Words, a delightfully illustrated collection of tricky and wonderful words.

What did you study at university?

I was an English major and a linguistics minor at Northwestern University. I was going to do a double major, but I was a bit burnt out by my senior year and a wise wise advisor told me that my work in a linguistics lab and the undergraduate research grants I got in linguistics would make it clear to anyone looking at my resume that I had a strong interest in linguistics. He told me I was a "minor plus," and no one would care that I wasn't a major after I had been working for a few years. I don't know that this is the right decision for everyone, but it was definitely the right decision for me.

As an undergrad, I worked in a child-language acquisition lab as an assistant to grad students. We used a methodology where we essentially acted out stories with toys for four year olds in an attempt to extract linguistic insight. My favorite linguistics class was historical linguistics because I got to spend quality time looking up words in the OED for the problem sets.

What is your job?

I'm a Linguist in Residence at Dictionary.com. I research and write definitions and work on other lexicographical content like Word of the Day and Word of the Year. Sometimes I write articles about language. I also consult on projects that require linguistic expertise, like last year I collaborated with our analytics team to rebuild our trending dashboard from scratch.

I also do a lot of media interviews for my job where I communicate what it is that we lexicographers spend our time doing for a general audience. Outside of my work at Dictionary.com, I'm on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. This is the group that reviews emoji proposals and makes recommendations on what new emoji appear on our devices.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

The research skills I learned as an undergraduate have come in extremely handy with my current work. In my English classes I learned how to do close readings of texts. This is something I do all the time as I look over examples of words in context in order to distill their meaning into concise definitions. As an undergrad linguistics student, I was often asked to look at a data set and find the patterns in that data. Modern lexicographers use corpus research to help understand patterns in language. When I write definitions and example sentences, I'm always thinking about the colocations of words so I can help present the most useful constructions to people looking up the word.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I wish I had done more computational linguistics and NLP as an undergrad. As I've gotten more into corpus research, I've discovered that this is something I'm really interested in. I know people don't always like to talk about money when they're talking to students about careers, but your earning potential goes up if you can pair linguistic research with a computational skill. This is something I have come to appreciate now that I live in one of the most expensive regions in the world.

Any other thoughts or comments?

I spent much of 2018 writing a book called The Dictionary of Difficult Words. It's a children's book, but it's for adults too. As the name suggests, it's a dictionary with only difficult words in it. It's highly illustrated, and for each letter, there's a beautiful full-page illustration with more information that can be read as an alphabet book within the dictionary. The first monolingual English dictionaries were dictionaries of difficult words, so I compiled the word list in that tradition. The amazing illustrations are by Louise Lockhart.

Previously:

Interview with a School Linguist

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Interview with an Agency Owner & Executive Editor

Interview with a Freelance Editor, Writer and Trainer

On 13th August 1867 Sir William Craigie, the Scottish lexicographer, was born.

One thing you cannae say about Sir William Craigie is, “He was a man of few words.” In fact, he was a man of many words; easily hundreds of thousands of words; more likely millions of words. In his day, Sir William was regarded as the foremost – nay, the most eminent – lexicographer, but he was also described as a language and literature scholar, and a philologist.

Isn’t it funny that us Scots started some of the most famous English establishments, like William Paterson who gave them The Bank of England, it took a Scotsman from Dundee to put the English language into a decent semblance of order, after he was engaged to work on what was then called the ‘New English Dictionary’ and which is now commonly referred to as the ‘Oxford Dictionary’ or the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’. He was editor of the dictionary for over 30 years.

He was also keen to promote the Scots language and pioneered a Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Craigie also worked on an Oxford edition of Hans Christian Andersen tales.Not content with sorting out the Scots and English words, Craigie went to the United States to work on the ‘Dictionary of American English’, Cragie also lectured on lexicography at the University of Chicago, where he taught many 20th Century American lexicographers of note.

With all this going on his pet project the Scots dictionary in was put on the back burner until 1921, when he began to make significant inroads towards producing ‘A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue; From the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenth’. Despite continued research into the Scots language, from a first publication in 1931 up until the end of his life, Craigie never managed to complete that work, however, the project he pioneered has been completed. Since 2004, thanks to the charitable organization, Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd., twelve volumes are available, free to search, via the Internet at the bottom of this post.

Cragie’s brainchild is now known as ‘DOST’ and covers the language from the era of ‘pre-literary’ Scots, when there was a very meagre, extant literary output (literally nothing more than Barbour’s ‘Brus’ and the ‘Legends of the Saints’), through that of ‘early’ Scots (1375 to 1450), to ‘middle’ Scots (up to 1700). The dictionary was intended to present the entire Older Scottish vocabulary as it was preserved in literary, documentary and other records.

On March *5th 1759 the lexicographer and church minister John Jamieson was born in Glasgow. *Some sources say March 3rd

I know most of you will not have heard of Jamieson, but his publication, Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, is credited with keeping the language alive., so much so much so he has even been the subject of a book about his work. Jamieson was a bit of a polymath though and learned in many fields, read on........

If you have read some of my posts I like to dig out documents etc from days gone by, a most of these are written in Scots, you only have to read the poetry of Robert Fergusson or Rabbie Burns, the vast majority which is written in the language, or up to modern times if you have read any of Irvine Welsh’s books, you will know that as a language it is distinctly different to what is termed as “proper English”

Anyway a bit about the man, Jamieson grew up in Glasgow as the only surviving son in a family with an invalid father, he entered Glasgow University aged at the staggeringly young age of just nine! From 1773 he studied the necessary course in theology with the Associate Presbytery of Glasgow, and in 1780 he was licensed to preach.

Jamieson was appointed to serve as minister to the newly established Secession congregation in Forfar, and stayed there for the next eighteen years, during which time he married Charlotte Watson, the daughter of a local widower, and started a family. Their marriage lasted fifty-five years and they had seventeen children, ten of whom reached adulthood, although only three outlived their father. He next became minister of the Edinburgh Nicolson Street congregation in 1797 where he guided the reconciliation of the Burgher and Anti-Burgher sects to a union in 1820.

In 1788 Jamieson’s writing was recognised by Princeton College, New Jersey where he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity. His other honours included membership of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries, of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, of the American Antiquarian Society of Boston, United States, and of the Copenhagen Society of Northern Literature. He was also a royal associate of the first class of the Royal Society of Literature instituted by George IV.

Jamieson’s chief work, the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language was published in two volumes in 1808 and was the standard reference work on the subject until the publication of the Scottish National Dictionary in 1931. He published several other works, but it is the dictionary he is best known for.

He had a particular passion for numismatics, and it was their mutual interest in coins which led to the first meeting between Jamieson and Walter Scott, in 1795, when Scott was only twenty-three and not yet a published author. Jamieson was also a keen angler, as the many entries relating to fishing terms in the Dictionary attest; and published occasional works of poetry, including a poem against the slave trade which was praised by abolitionists in its day. Entries provided by Scott include besom, which he described as a “low woman or prostitute,” and screed, defined as a “long revel” or “hearty drinking bout”. I wonder how many Scottish females have been called “a wee besom” by their mothers with neither really knowing it’s true meaning!

Jamieson’s association with Walter Scott was a two way thing, he wrote a Scots poem *‘The Water Kelpie’ for the second edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 8

*One source say this was actually an Alexander Jamieson, but my research took me to three different sources citing it as yer man in this post.

It was through his antiquarian research that Jamieson developed his practice of tracing words (particularly place-names) to their earliest form and occurrence: a method which was to be the foundation of the historical approach he would use in the Dictionary.

Jamieson wrote on other themes: rhetoric, cremation, and the royal palaces of Scotland, besides publishing occasional sermons. In 1820 he issued edited versions of Barbour’s The Brus and Blind Harry’s Wallace.

Revered by authors including Hugh MacDiarmid, who used it to shape his poetic output, Jamieson’s dictionary has long been regarded as a crucial groundwork which kept alive the Scots language at a time when it was in danger of falling into obscurity.

He retired due to ill health in 1830 and died at home, 4 George Square, Edinburgh on 12th July 1838, he has a fine gravestone in St Cuthbert’s graveyard in Edinburgh, as seen in the fourth pic.

Here is the first of 24 verses of his aforementioned poem, you can read the rest on the link to the excellent Random Scottish History, at the bottom.

Water Kelpie

Aft, owre the bent, with heather blent,

And throw the forest brown,

I tread the path to yon green strath,

Quhare brae-born Esk rins down.

Its banks alang, quhilk hazels thrang,

Quhare sweet-sair’d hawthorns blow,

I lufe to stray, and view the play

Of fleckit scules below

James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary paased away on July 26th 1915.

A couple of things that I love about this, 1; a Scot was the first editor of the most famous English dictionary, a 2; the picture of Murray, he just looks the part!

He was certainly something of a prodigy as a child, despite his humble background. Born in the Borders village of Denholm, near Hawick, the son of a tailor, he reputedly knew his alphabet by the time he was eighteen months old, and was soon showing a precocious interest in other languages, including—at the age of 7—Chinese.

Thanks to his voracious appetite for reading, and what he called ‘a sort of mania for learning languages’, he was already a remarkably well-educated boy by the time his formal schooling ended, at the age of 14, with a knowledge of French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek, oh and of course Gaelic, along with a range of other interests, including botany, geology, and archaeology. After a few years teaching in local schools—he was evidently a born teacher, and was made a headmaster at the age of 21—he moved to London, and took work in a bank.

e soon began to attend meetings of the London Philological Society, and threw himself into the study of dialect and pronunciation—an interest he had already developed while still in Scotland—and also of the history of English. In 1870 an opening at Mill Hill School, just outside London, enabled him to return to teaching. He began studying for an external London BA degree, which he finished in 1873, the same year as his first big scholarly publication, a study of Scottish dialects which was widely recognized as a pioneering work in its field and was the first ever sustained history of the Scots tongue.

Only a year later his linguistic research had earned him his first honorary degree, a doctorate from Edinburgh University: quite an achievement for a self-taught man of 37.

In 1876 Murray was approached by the London publishers Macmillans about the possibility of editing a dictionary, he accepted the challenged and it was generally thought the publication would take around ten years to complete and run to 6,400 pages, in four volumes, he undertook the work while still teaching at Mill Hill, although he did enlist help in several assistants.

Five years later- no- he hadn’t finished it, he was a genius but not that much, they published the first volume, A-Ant, to steal the words from a future film, they were going to need a bigger book!“ The team sent out the call for volunteers all across the country. one American man, William Chester Minor, even responded from his prison cell in Broadmoor while serving a life sentence for murder. still suffered from paranoid delusions, some saw his work on the Oxford English Dictionary as a form of therapy. Minor became a regular collaborator with Murray as he sent his notes to the editor every week for 20 years. Every letter Minor signed with the closing, “Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire.

Murray soon had to give up his school teaching, and moved to Oxford in 1885; even then progress was too slow, and eventually three other Editors were appointed, each with responsibility for different parts of the alphabet. Although for more than three-quarters of the time he worked on the OED there were other Editors working alongside him—he eventually died in 1915—and although he had a staff of assistants helping him, it is without question that he was the Editor of the Dictionary.

It was not until 1928 that C. T. Onions and William Craigie finally finished the main text. In terms of the methodology he developed, The Oxford English Dictionary is largely Murray’s creation; as the ‘Historical Introduction’ to the OED states, ‘to Murray belongs the credit for giving it, at the outset, a form which proved to be adequate to the end’.

In his private life Murray married an Ada Agnes Ruthven and they found time to have 11 children together, all of whom reached adulthood, and unusual occurrence back then. Some even helped him in the compilation of the OED. The last pic is great and shows him astride a huge ‘sand-monster’ constructed on the beach during one of the family’s holidays in North Wales.

He was never made a Fellow of an Oxford college, to their shame, and only received an Oxford honorary doctorate the year before his death.

He died of pleurisy on this day 1915 and requested to be buried in Oxford beside the grave of his best friend, James Legge.