The History of the Oxford English Dictionary

This post about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary tells how one enormous book came to tell the story of the English language.

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Imagine being given a seemingly impossible task.

You have been asked to make a dictionary containing every word in the English language, not simply what the words mean today, but where they came from, how people have used them, how their meanings have changed and, wherever possible, the earliest evidence you can find for their use.

There are no computers, no internet and no searchable database.

There isn’t even a photocopier.

Instead, you have books, newspapers, letters and manuscripts. Along with thousands of people reading enormous quantities of text and writing examples of words onto tiny slips of paper. You have rooms full of pigeonholes stuffed with pieces of paper. You have editors trying to work out which quotation belongs with which word.

And you have no idea quite how long the project will take.

This extraordinary undertaking eventually produced the Oxford English Dictionary, commonly known as the OED.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary is written as a companion post to my post about The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Click this link to be taken to that post.

This is the History of the Oxford English Dictionary

It is easy to think of a dictionary as something rather dry: a book that tells us how to spell a word or gives us its definition.

But the history of the OED is anything but dry.

It is a story about Victorian Britain, education, science, social change, publishing, empire, technology, women, war, crime, libraries and ordinary readers. Most importantly, it is a story about how people decided that the history of a language was worth preserving.

It is also a wonderful way for children to discover that words are historical objects. They can tell us what people believed, what they invented, what they feared, what they ate, where they travelled and how society changed.

What exactly is the Oxford English Dictionary?

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary

Before we begin, it is worth clearing up a common misunderstanding.

The OED is not simply a very large version of an ordinary dictionary.

A modern dictionary might tell us that telephone means a device used to communicate with someone at a distance.

The OED goes much further.

It is a historical dictionary. It attempts to show the history of a word: its different meanings, its development and evidence of how it has actually been used in English.

The project was conceived by the Philological Society of London in 1857, and the first edition was eventually published in instalments between 1884 and 1928. At the time, its official title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

That word, historical, is crucial.

The dictionary wasn’t supposed to tell English speakers which words they were allowed to use.

Instead, it attempted to record the language as it had actually been used.

That was a revolutionary idea.

In this post, we will be delving deep into the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Britain in the Nineteenth Century

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams Review

To understand why anyone would attempt such an enormous dictionary, we first need to understand the world in which the idea developed.

The nineteenth century was a period of enormous change.

Britain was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Factories expanded. Railways crossed the country. Cities grew rapidly. New machines and technologies appeared.

People were travelling more quickly than previous generations could have imagined.

The telegraph allowed messages to travel over enormous distances.

Steamships transformed travel.

Factories created new kinds of work.

Newspapers became increasingly important.

And more and more people were learning to read.

These changes created something very important for language:

new words.

Every new invention, occupation, scientific discovery and social movement could require new vocabulary.

Words also travelled.

A person living in London might encounter a word that had originated in Scotland, India, America, Africa or Australia. The expanding British Empire brought English into contact with hundreds of other languages.

English was changing and changing rapidly.

At the same time, scholars were becoming increasingly interested in the history of languages.

Instead of simply asking, ‘What does this word mean?’, scholars increasingly wanted to ask:

Where did this word come from?

When did people first use it?

How did its meaning change?

What other languages influenced it?

This was the intellectual world into which the idea of a historical English dictionary was born.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: 1857 – The Idea Begins

In 1857, a group of scholars belonging to the Philological Society began planning an ambitious new dictionary.

The story began partly with a problem.

The English language was much larger and more complicated than the dictionaries available at the time could fully describe.

One of the important figures was Richard Chenevix Trench, an Anglican archbishop and scholar. His work helped inspire the idea of creating a dictionary that would provide much more comprehensive historical evidence.

The project initially focused on words that had not been adequately recorded in existing dictionaries.

But the ambition soon grew.

Rather than simply making a supplement to existing dictionaries, the scholars wanted to create something much bigger:

a comprehensive historical dictionary of the English language.

This is an excellent example of how historical projects can change as people begin to understand their scale.

At first, they thought they were building one thing.

Then they realised they were attempting something much, much larger.

Why Old Books Became So Important

Suppose you want to discover when a word first appeared in English.

How would you do it?

You could ask somebody.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be reliable.

People’s memories aren’t perfect.

Instead, the dictionary-makers wanted evidence.

If they found the word in a book published in 1600, they could record that example.

If they then found it in a book from 1450, they had discovered an earlier example.

And if they found it in a 1200 manuscript, they could go back even further.

This meant that the dictionary-makers needed people to read huge numbers of texts.

They weren’t just looking for definitions.

They were looking for quotations showing words being used in real life.

This was one of the most important innovations in the making of the dictionary.

A word would be supported by evidence from literature, newspapers, histories, scientific works and other writing.

The OED, therefore, became something like a gigantic collection of historical evidence on English.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: Herbert Coleridge and the First Attempts

One of the first editors was Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge began organising the enormous quantity of material being gathered for the proposed dictionary.

But this was an incredibly difficult job.

The project was new.

There was no established method for producing a dictionary on this scale.

And Coleridge died in 1861, aged only 30.

The work was taken over by another energetic scholar:

Frederick James Furnivall.

Furnivall was an extraordinary character, enthusiastic, energetic and involved in many scholarly and social causes.

He encouraged volunteers to read books and collect examples of words.

This introduced one of the most remarkable features of the dictionary’s history:

Ordinary people could contribute to a major scholarly project.

The OED was not created solely by professors sitting in university offices.

Thousands of readers eventually helped gather its evidence.

The ‘Volunteers’ who Helped Build the Dictionary

Today, we are used to crowdsourcing.

We might contribute photographs to an online project, correct information on a website, identify objects in a museum collection or help transcribe historical documents.

The OED was doing something surprisingly similar, except it was happening in the nineteenth century.

Volunteers were given lists of books or words to investigate.

They read and searched.

They copied examples.

And they sent their findings to the dictionary editors.

Imagine doing this without being able to type a search term into a computer.

If you wanted to find examples of a particular word in a book, you had to read the book.

Sometimes you might read hundreds of pages before finding the evidence you needed.

The project therefore depended upon a vast network of people who were willing to give their time to something that might not be completed during their lifetimes.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: The Arrival of James Murray

By the 1870s, the project was struggling.

Furnivall had gathered enormous quantities of material, but the work needed stronger organisation.

Then came the man who would become the most famous editor of the dictionary:

James Murray.

Murray was a Scottish schoolteacher and scholar.

He was not a conventional Oxford professor.

In fact, when he became editor, he initially continued his work as a schoolmaster.

In 1879, Oxford University Press appointed Murray as editor of the dictionary.

The original plan was wildly optimistic.

The dictionary was expected to contain around 6,400 pages and take about ten years to complete.

Instead, the project would take decades.

The first edition was not finished until 1928.

That means the project stretched from the Victorian era into the twentieth century.

It outlived Queen Victoria, surviving enormous changes in British society.

It continued through the First World War.

And some of the people who began working on it did not live to see the finished dictionary.

Murray’s Scriptorium

One of the most fascinating places in the story was Murray’s Scriptorium.

The name sounds as though it belongs in a medieval monastery, but Murray’s Scriptorium was a purpose-built workroom in his garden.

Inside were shelves and pigeonholes designed to hold the enormous collection of quotation slips.

The slips were the raw materials from which the dictionary was constructed.

Think of each slip as a tiny piece of historical evidence.

One might contain a quotation from Shakespeare.

Another might come from a newspaper.

Yet another might come from a scientific book.

And another could come from a novel written hundreds of years earlier.

The slips were organised according to the words they illustrated.

Murray and his assistants could then examine the evidence and work out how a word had developed.

The Scriptorium was therefore rather like a nineteenth-century combination of:

library + archive + research laboratory + filing system.

And it was filled with paper.

Lots and lots of paper.

Murray’s Scriptorium became an essential part of the physical history of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A Dictionary Made From Millions of Tiny Pieces of Evidence

This is one of the best ideas to explore with children:

The OED was not written from someone’s imagination.

It was built from evidence.

Imagine that we wanted to understand the history of the word ‘computer.’

We might search historical newspapers and books.

We could discover that the word existed long before the electronic computer.

Originally, a ‘computer’ could mean a person who computes.

Only later did the word become strongly associated with machines.

The history of the word therefore reflects a history of technology.

This is what makes historical dictionaries so interesting.

A word can be a tiny doorway into the past.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: The Victorian World Changes the Language

While Murray and his colleagues were working, Britain itself was changing.

The nineteenth century saw the expansion of:

railways
factories
newspapers
public libraries
postal services
mass publishing
scientific institutions
formal schooling
political movements
women’s organisations
international trade
imperial networks

Each of these developments affected language.

New inventions needed names.

New political ideas needed vocabulary.

And new scientific discoveries created technical terms.

Words from other languages entered English.

Old words acquired new meanings.

And ordinary people began using printed language in new ways.

The dictionary was therefore being created during a period when English itself was undergoing enormous transformation.

Literacy and Education

One of the most important historical connections is the growth of literacy.

In earlier centuries, books were expensive and reading was much less widespread.

During the nineteenth century, however, education and literacy expanded significantly.

The Education Act of 1870 established a system of elementary education in England and Wales, and further reforms gradually expanded access to schooling.

By the time the OED was being compiled, Britain was becoming a much more literate society.

The Importance of Newspapers and Popular Reading

The OED did not only care about great literature.

This is another fascinating point for children to investigate.

The dictionary needed evidence of real language use.

That could come from a famous author, but it could also come from other kinds of writing.

Newspapers were particularly useful because they recorded the language of contemporary society.

As mass newspapers expanded during the nineteenth century, they became historical records of changing vocabulary.

A newspaper might reveal the appearance of a new political term.

A report might contain a new scientific word.

An advertisement might show how a word was being used commercially.

A newspaper therefore wasn’t merely something people read over breakfast.

For future historians and lexicographers, it became evidence.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: The Mystery of William Chester Minor

One of the most famous people connected with the OED was Dr William Chester Minor.

His story is extraordinary and should be approached sensitively with older children.

Minor was an American surgeon and former Union Army doctor who had served during the American Civil War.

In 1872, while living in London, he shot and killed a man named George Merritt.

Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was confined to Broadmoor, the institution then known as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

While there, he became a remarkably productive volunteer contributor to the OED.

He owned a large collection of books and spent many hours finding examples of words and sending quotations to Murray.

The OUP archives describe him as one of the most important volunteer contributors to the dictionary.

Eventually Murray learned more about Minor’s circumstances and visited him.

The story is a powerful reminder that historical figures cannot always be neatly placed into categories such as good or bad.

Minor had committed a terrible crime.

He also made an enormous contribution to scholarship.

Both facts belong to his history.

For younger children, this story can simply be mentioned as an example of how many different people contributed to the OED. Older children can explore questions about crime, mental illness, Victorian attitudes and historical judgement.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: The Women Behind the Dictionary

Another important aspect of the OED’s history is the contribution of women.

For a long time, histories of the dictionary tended to focus heavily on famous male editors.

But women also contributed to the project.

Women worked as assistants, proofreaders and volunteer readers, and women sent in examples of word usage.

This is particularly important when studying the OED alongside the history of the women’s suffrage movement.

The dictionary was being created at exactly the time when women in Britain were challenging traditional ideas about their role in society.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw campaigns for women’s education, employment, political representation and voting rights.

The first women in Britain gained the vote on a limited basis in 1918, with equal voting rights with men coming in 1928.

The history of the OED therefore overlaps with a huge transformation in the position of women in British society.

This is one reason The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams provides such an interesting fictional companion to the subject.

A Gentle Introduction to The Dictionary of Lost Words

Pip Williams’s historical novel The Dictionary of Lost Words is set in the world of the OED and follows Esme, a fictional character whose life becomes intertwined with the dictionary’s creation.

Children should understand that the novel is historical fiction, not a factual account of everything that happened.

Williams researched the real history of the OED and incorporated real people, places and events, but she created fictional characters and relationships to tell her story. Williams herself has explained that the novel grew from her discovery of evidence concerning the word ‘bondmaid’, which she imagined into a wider story.

The novel is particularly interesting because it asks a question that historians should always ask:

Whose experiences get recorded in history, and whose might be forgotten?

This connects beautifully with the history of the Oxford Dictionary.

A dictionary is built from evidence.

But who chooses the books?

Who writes the books?

Whose speech is recorded?

Which words are considered important?

Which words disappear?

These questions are particularly relevant when studying women, working-class people and other groups whose experiences were sometimes less likely to appear in the published texts that nineteenth-century scholars collected.

Williams uses the fictional story to explore these ideas, particularly during the women’s suffrage movement and the years surrounding the First World War.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is an excellent addition to a unit exploring the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The First World War Changes Everything

By the early twentieth century, the world of the OED was changing again.

In 1914, Britain entered the First World War.

The war affected almost every aspect of British life.

Millions of men served in the armed forces.

Women entered occupations previously dominated by men.

New technologies appeared.

New weapons and military systems created new vocabulary.

People encountered words from other countries and armies.

And the social structure of Britain was changing.

The OED project continued through these extraordinary years.

Think about the contrast:

While soldiers were fighting in the trenches of Europe, lexicographers were still working through their quotation slips.

The dictionary was a long-term project that continued despite enormous historical disruption.

This makes the OED a fascinating object for studying continuity and change.

The world around it could change dramatically, while the work of recording the language continued.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: 1928 – The Dictionary is Finally Complete

At last, after decades of work, the first edition was completed in 1928.

It had taken approximately 70 years from the original conception of the project and almost half a century from Murray’s appointment.

The final work was vastly larger than the original plan.

The people who began the project in the 1850s could never have known exactly what it would become.

By 1928:

Queen Victoria had been dead for nearly three decades.
Britain had experienced the First World War.
Women had gained the vote.
The motor car had transformed transport.
The aeroplane had become a reality.
Radio was changing communication.
The British Empire was at a very different point in its history.
Millions of people lived in a modern industrial society.

And yet the dictionary was still recording words that had been used centuries earlier.

It was, in a sense, a bridge connecting the medieval past, the Victorian age and the modern twentieth century.

The Dictionary Did Not Stop in 1928

The story of the OED did not end with the completion of the first edition.

A Supplement was published in 1933.

A much larger second Supplement appeared between 1972 and 1986.

These were combined with the original dictionary to create the second edition in 1989.

Then came another extraordinary transformation.

In 2000, the OED became available online.

Instead of enormous printed volumes occupying shelves in libraries, people could search the dictionary electronically.

And the dictionary entered another major phase: its ongoing third-edition revision, known as OED3.

The OED’s history therefore stretches from Victorian paper slips to the digital age.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: From Paper Slips to the Internet

This transformation provides a brilliant opportunity for children to think about technology.

Imagine researching one word in:

1880

You would need books, paper, ink and patience.

1950

You might use enormous printed dictionaries in a library.

1990

You could use a CD-ROM or printed reference book.

Today

You can search an online database in seconds.

But here’s the fascinating part:

The technology changed much faster than the historical evidence.

A quotation written hundreds of years ago can still be useful today.

A word used in a medieval manuscript can still tell us something about English.

The digital OED hasn’t made the old evidence unnecessary.

It has simply made it easier to search and organise.

Why Dictionaries are Historical Sources

As you can see in this post about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, a dictionary can be a history book.

Not in the conventional sense.

It doesn’t tell us the story of a battle or the life of a king.

Instead, it records changes in the way humans communicate.

Consider what the appearance of a word might tell us.

A new word connected with:

railways might tell us about industrialisation;
medicine might tell us about scientific developments;
politics might tell us about changing political ideas;
women’s employment might tell us about social change;
technology might tell us about inventions;
food might tell us about trade and migration;
war might tell us about military history;
fashion might tell us about changing culture.

A single word can therefore become a miniature historical source.

Words Travel Through History

English is not a language that developed in isolation.

It has borrowed words from many other languages.

Some came through conquest.

Some came through trade.

Others came through migration.

And more came through scientific and cultural exchange.

For example, English contains words with roots in languages including:

French, Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Italian, Spanish and many others.

The story of English is therefore also a story of contact between peoples.

This is particularly important when studying the British Empire.

Britain’s global connections helped English spread across the world, while English itself absorbed vocabulary from other languages and cultures.

The history of a language can therefore reveal a complicated history of power, migration, trade and cultural exchange.

What does the OED teach us about history?

The history of the Oxford English Dictionary gives homeschoolers an unusual opportunity because it combines so many subjects.

History

Children can study:

Victorian Britain
the Industrial Revolution
education reform
literacy
publishing
the British Empire
women’s suffrage
the First World War
changing technology
twentieth-century society

English

They can investigate:

etymology
spelling
meanings
dialects
borrowed words
quotations
language change
historical fiction

Geography

They can trace how words travelled between:

Britain
Europe
North America
Asia
Africa
Australia

Science and Technology

They can investigate how inventions created new vocabulary.

Sociology

They can ask whose language gets recorded and whose experiences may be overlooked.

Research skills

They can learn how historians and lexicographers use evidence.

And perhaps most importantly:

They can learn that language is alive.

A Simple Experiment: Watch a Word Change

Choose a familiar word.

For example:

‘mouse.’

Ask your child what it means.

They will probably think of the small animal.

But a modern child may also think of a computer mouse.

The object existed long before computers.

The word existed long before computers.

Yet its meaning expanded.

That is language change in action.

Now try:

cloud

A cloud can be something in the sky.

But in modern computing, “the cloud” has another meaning.

Or:

tablet

A tablet could once mean a flat piece of stone or a small slab.

Today, it may also mean an electronic device…or a medicine.

The lesson is simple:

New inventions don’t always create completely new words. Sometimes we give old words new meanings.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: What Can a Dictionary Leave Out?

This is where the story becomes particularly interesting.

A historical dictionary depends upon historical evidence.

But historical evidence is never complete.

Suppose a nineteenth-century working-class woman used a word every day with her friends.

If she never wrote it down, there might be little evidence for lexicographers to find.

Suppose a child used a particular expression in the playground.

Unless somebody recorded it, it might disappear from the historical record.

Suppose women used words in private letters, conversations or domestic spaces rather than in published books.

Those words could be much harder for nineteenth-century scholars to discover.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the dictionary-makers deliberately ignored people.

It means that history itself has gaps.

This is one of the central ideas explored through the fictional world of The Dictionary of Lost Words.

The novel invites us to think about the words and experiences that might fall through the cracks of an official historical record.

The Great Lesson: History is Made from Evidence

The OED is a wonderful case study for teaching children historical thinking.

Historians don’t simply ask:

‘What do I think happened?’

They ask:

‘What evidence do we have?’

Then:

‘How reliable is that evidence?’

Then:

‘What might be missing?’

The dictionary-makers were doing something remarkably similar.

They collected examples, compared them and arranged them chronologically.

They considered meanings.

And finally, they looked for earlier examples and revised their conclusions as new evidence emerged.

That is very similar to the process historians use to reconstruct the past.

Timeline: The History of the Oxford English Dictionary

1857

The Philological Society develops the idea of a comprehensive historical dictionary of English.

1861

Herbert Coleridge dies, and Frederick Furnivall takes over much of the work.

1870s

The project struggles with its enormous scale and organisation.

1878

Oxford University Press agrees to take on publication of the project.

1879

James Murray becomes editor and begins reorganising the project.

1879–1880

Murray appeals to English-speaking and English-reading people around the world for volunteers to collect quotations.

1884

The first instalment, or fascicle, of the dictionary is published.

1890s

Murray discovers the extraordinary extent of William Chester Minor’s contributions.

1914–1918

The First World War disrupts British life while work on the dictionary continues.

1918

Some British women receive the vote.

1928

The first edition of the dictionary is finally completed.

1933

A Supplement is published.

1972–1986

A much larger Supplement is produced.

1989

The first edition and Supplements are combined into the second edition.

2000

The OED becomes available online.

Today

The OED continues to be revised and expanded as part of its third edition.

The History of the Oxford English Dictionary: Homeschool Activities

1. Become a Word Detective

Choose five words your child uses every day.

For example:

dog
house
school
train
computer

Ask:

What do you think this word meant 100 years ago?

Did the object exist then?

Could the word have another meaning?

Draw a picture of each word and write its modern meaning underneath.

History connection

Explain that the people who made the OED were trying to discover how words had been used in the past.

2. Make Your Own Quotation Slips

Give your child small pieces of paper.

Choose one word, such as happy.

Whenever they find the word in a book you are reading together, write the sentence on a slip.

Put all the slips into a box.

After a week, sort them.

Which sentences use the word in similar ways?

Can your child make a definition from the examples?

The Big Idea

Your child has just recreated a tiny version of the OED’s evidence-gathering process.

3. Old and New Words

Make two columns:

Words my great-grandparents might have used

Words I use today

Discuss words connected with technology.

Examples might include:

telephone
television
computer
internet
smartphone

Ask:

Which words would a Victorian child recognise?

4. Build a Word Timeline

Choose a word.

Find examples of it in books from different periods if possible.

Create a timeline:

1800 → 1850 → 1900 → 1950 → 2000 → today

Write down what the word meant or how it was used in each period.

Extension

Ask:

What was happening in history when the meaning changed?

5. Design a Victorian Dictionary

Imagine you are James Murray!

It is 1880, and you have been asked to help create a great new dictionary of the English language.

Your job is to design one page of your very own Victorian dictionary.

Choose a word, perhaps:

railway • bicycle • factory • telephone • school • photograph • happy

Now create a dictionary entry for your word.

Your Dictionary Entry

WORD:
Write your word in large letters.

PRONUNCIATION:
How would you say it?

MEANING:
What does the word mean?

EXAMPLE:
Write a sentence showing how the word was used.

QUOTATION:
Imagine you have found the word in an old Victorian book. Write a short quotation containing your word.

DATE:
When do you think this word was first used?

ORIGIN:
Where might the word have come from?

MEANING THEN & NOW:
Does the word mean the same thing today?

Make It Victorian!

Decorate your dictionary page as though it were being created in 1880.

You could include:

a Victorian-style title
quotation slips
tiny illustrations of old books
an ink bottle and quill
decorative letters
notes from your imaginary researchers

Remember: your dictionary is trying to preserve evidence about how people used words.

Think Like James Murrey

Imagine you have found three different quotations containing your word.

Do all three quotations use the word in exactly the same way?

What could these quotations tell you about the word’s meaning?

Challenge question

Why couldn’t Murray simply search a computer?

6. Invent a Victorian Advertisement

Choose a Victorian invention such as:

railway
telephone
electric light
bicycle
typewriter

Write an advertisement introducing it to the public.

Then invent one new word that people might use for it.

Ask:

Why do new inventions sometimes create new words?

7. Become a Historical Lexicographer

Choose an old word or a word whose meaning has changed.

Research:

What does it mean today?
What did it mean in the past?
Where did it come from?
When is the earliest evidence you can find?
Has its meaning changed?
Why might that change have happened?

Present your findings as a miniature dictionary entry.

8. The History Hidden Inside a Word

Choose one word connected with Victorian history:

factory

railway

suffrage

empire

photograph

Research the word and then research the history surrounding it.

Ask:

What does this word tell us about nineteenth-century society?

For example, railway isn’t merely a transport word.

It opens the door to industrialisation, engineering, urbanisation, travel, employment and social change.

9. Who Gets Remembered?

Read about the famous men associated with the OED.

Then research women who contributed to the project.

Discuss:

Why might some contributors have become famous while others were forgotten?

This can lead into a wider study of women’s history.

10. Is a Dictionary a Historical Source?

Write an essay answering:

‘To what extent can the Oxford English Dictionary be used as a source for studying social history?’

Encourage the student to consider:

evidence;
bias;
surviving sources;
published versus spoken language;
class;
gender;
education;
geography;
empire;
changing meanings.

A strong answer should recognise that a dictionary is both an enormous source of evidence and a product of the society that created it.

11. Compare History with Historical Fiction

Read selected sections of The Dictionary of Lost Words alongside factual accounts of the OED.

Create three columns:

Fact	Fiction	Why might the author have changed or invented this?
James Murray was a real editor
The Scriptorium was real
Volunteers collected quotations
William Chester Minor was a real contributor
Esme	Fictional

The important lesson is that historical fiction is not the same as a textbook.

It can be inspired by real events while using invented characters and situations to explore historical questions.

12. Debate: Can a Dictionary Ever Record Every Word?

Split the family into two teams.

Team A

Argue:

‘A dictionary can record a language accurately.’

Team B

Argue:

‘No dictionary can ever record an entire living language.’

Students should consider:

slang;
regional dialects;
private language;
children’s language;
new technology;
social media;
words that disappear;
words that change meaning;
languages borrowing words from one another.

Then ask the more difficult question:

Who gets to decide what counts as a word?

A Family Project: Create Your Own Family Dictionary

This could make a wonderful long-term homeschool project.

Create a Family Dictionary.

Every family member contributes words.

Include:

Word

The word itself.

Definition

What it means in your family.

Example

A sentence showing how it is used.

Origin

Where you think it came from.

First recorded use

When you remember hearing it.

Contributor

Who uses it.

Illustration

Draw a picture.

You could even include family expressions that outsiders would not understand.

For example, perhaps your family has a funny name for a particular meal, a place, an object or an activity.

After several months, you will have created your own tiny historical record.

And this leads to one of the most important lessons from the OED:

Language isn’t only something that belongs to famous writers.

It belongs to everybody.

A Final Thought: Every Word has a Story

The Oxford English Dictionary began as a scholarly project in Victorian Britain.

It grew through the work of editors, assistants and thousands of volunteers.

It was built from tiny pieces of evidence copied from books and other texts.

The Oxford English Dictionary even survived financial problems, organisational difficulties, changing editors, social upheaval and two centuries of technological transformation.

But perhaps its greatest achievement is something deceptively simple.

It reminds us that words have histories.

When we use a word today, we are participating in a story that may have begun hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

The word may have travelled across countries.

It may have changed its meaning.

Or even have been borrowed from another language.

It may have been used by kings, soldiers, scientists, children, poets, factory workers or immigrants.

It may have disappeared for a while and then returned.

And sometimes, as The Dictionary of Lost Words beautifully explores, a word can almost vanish from the historical record.

That makes the history of the Oxford English Dictionary about much more than dictionaries.

It is about who gets remembered.

It is about how we know what we know.

And it is about the relationship between language and history and the extraordinary idea that something as small as a single word can contain a piece of the past.

So the next time you open a dictionary, don’t just look at the definition.

Look at the word.

Ask where it came from and who used it.

Ask how its meaning changed.

And ask what its history can tell you about the people who spoke it.

Because sometimes, the history of a civilisation is hiding in a single word.