You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

[a. OF. element, ad. L. elementum, a word of which the etymology and primary meaning are uncertain, but which was employed as transl. of Gr. στοιχειον in the various senses:—a component unit of a series; a constituent part of a complex whole (hence the ‘four elements’); a member of the planetary system; a letter of the alphabet; a fundamental principle of a science.]

  Definitions, sometimes running to dozens of numbered senses, are laid out in a hierarchical outline, with meanings grouped into families. Daggers indicate obsolete definitions:

  I. A component part of a complex whole.

  * of material things.

  1. One of the simple substances of which all material bodies are compounded.

  †a. In ancient and mediæval philosophy these were believed to be: Earth, water, air, and fire. See examples in 9. Obs. exc. Hist.

  †b. In pre-scientific chemistry the supposed ‘elements’ were variously enumerated, the usual number being about five or six. (See quots.)…

  c. In modern chemistry applied to those substances (of which more than seventy are now known) which have hitherto resisted analysis, and which are provisionally supposed to be simple bodies… .

  2. In wider sense: One of the relatively simple substances of which a complex substance is composed; in pl. the ‘raw material’ of which a thing is made… .

  3. The bread and wine used in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Chiefly pl.

  Under each definition appears a series of quotations, in chronological order:

  1813 SIR H. DAVY Agric. Chem. i. (1814) 8 Bodies . . not capable of being decompounded are considered . . as elements. 1830 M. DONOVAN Dom. Econ. I. 111 Sugar is composed of three elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. 1841 EMERSON Ess. Hist. Wks. (Bohn) I. 17 Fifty or sixty chemical elements. 1854 BUSHNAN in Circ. Sc. (c 1865) II. 6/1 The proximate elements are formed by the union of several ultimate elements. 1881 WILLIAMSON in Nature No. 618. 414 The foundation of . . chemistry was laid by the discovery of chemical elements.

  The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles—such was the original title—took far longer than the early planners expected. Murray died in 1915, having completed Q; his assistants carried on to the end of the alphabet. The tenth volume, wise–zyxt, appeared on April 19, 1928, and it was followed in 1933 by complete republication with the contents rejiggered into twelve volumes, with a thirteenth supplemental volume that brought some of the early material up to date and corrected some errors. The title was also changed in the reissue: now that Oxford University Press was firmly in charge, it was officially the Oxford English Dictionary.

  A series of supplements appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, bringing the Victorian material up to date; in 1989, the supplements were merged with the main body of the dictionary into one long sequence to produce the second edition, or OED2. A third edition is now under way, but this time it will be a top-to-bottom rewrite: most of the work in OED2 dates back to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Updates continue apace, made easier now that the whole is maintained online. As I write, the OED contains 2,674 words first used in the 1970s (benchmarking, carjacking, factoid, mail bomb, retro), 1,580 from the 1980s (biodiversity, bitch-slap, gaydar, power-walk, studmuffin), 632 from the 1990s (bootylicious, cybercafe, dotcom, smackdown, spammer), and 64 from the 2000s (bromance, crowdsource, podcast, selfie, waterboarding). As time passes, recent decades will be more fully represented.

  The accomplishment of these historical dictionaries—begun in the era of the quill pen, completed in the era of the typewriter—is astonishing. The searches made possible by computers and huge textual corpora have revolutionized historical lexicography; we can now turn up the evidence required for a dictionary entry with little effort. But de Vries, Murray, and their successors did it all with only sharp eyes and patient attention. Any modern lexicographer who has closely examined the quality of this work, conceived and largely carried out in the nineteenth century, has to admire their achievement in making every word tell its own story.

  CHAPTER 18 ½

  OVERLONG AND OVERDUE

  When Charles Dickens’s young hero David Copperfield arrives at a new school he meets the elderly schoolmaster, Dr. Strong, a true scholar, “always engaged in looking out for Greek roots” for his classical dictionary. But while Strong had convinced himself “he had been advancing with it wonderfully,” his progress was not all it might be. One of David’s classmates with “a turn for mathematics” looked at how long he had been working, how much he had completed, and how much he had yet to do, and delivered the estimate, “It might be done in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the Doctor’s last, or sixty-second, birthday.”1 Dr. Strong’s progress is all too typical of actual reference books. Every major reference project ends up overlong, overdue, and over budget.

  The editorial apology for missed deadlines is an essential part of every dictionary or encyclopedia preface. Thomas Blount apologized for his Glossographia (1656), which “has taken me up the vacancy of above Twenty years”;2 Abraham Rees’s Cyclopædia (1802–20) also trickled out over two decades, prompting him to write, even more embarrassed, “Some apology may, perhaps, be thought necessary for the extension of this work beyond the limits first proposed.”3 But twenty years is nothing in the world of reference publishing. The Académie Française started its Dictionnaire in 1635 and spent fifty-nine years on it—during which time two rival dictionaries were begun and finished. The same story is written today. DICTIONARY REACHES FINAL DEFINITION AFTER CENTURY reads a BBC headline of August 31, 2014, reporting the completion of The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, launched in 1913 and completed, with an entry for zythum, 101 years later.4

  Extra time almost always means extra space. The French Encyclopédie was planned for ten volumes, eight of text and two of illustrations. Had it appeared in that format, it still would have been longer than any of its competitors in France or England.5 But it ended up 250 percent over its projected size, with seventeen volumes of text and eleven of illustrations. Charles Joseph Panckoucke declared confidently that his Encyclopédie méthodique, planned for twenty-one volumes, would be finished in five years, but, as one historian notes, “he was already wondering if his estimate of the number of volumes was entirely accurate.”6 He was right to wonder. The encyclopedia began appearing in November 1782, but it was not completed until 1832, when it occupied more than two hundred volumes, exceeding his estimates of both time and length by a factor of ten.

  Some projects chug along at a reasonable pace for a while, only to hit a snag. The Videnskabernes Selskabs Ordbog, the great Danish dictionary sponsored by the Academy of Sciences, began appearing in 1781, with the first full volume coming out in 1793. Volumes appeared every few years until 1853, when the dictionary had reached U. The final volume, though, V–Z, did not appear until 1905, fifty-two years after the prior volume. Altogether it took 112 years to get from volume 1 to volume 8.

  The early plan for what became the Oxford English Dictionary called for a book about the size of Webster’s American Dictionary, to be completed in ten years. Five years into the project, half the projected time for the whole dictionary, the lexicographers had reached the word ant, and they had not published a page. The publishers (Macmillan—Oxford University Press had not yet come on board) were concerned about the length. They thought 2,000 pages about right, and drew a firm line at 4,000. The Philological Society came back with a counteroffer of 5,000 pages, thinking it would probably end up closer to 6,000. Macmillan, eager to compromise, settled on 4,800 pages.7 But both the page count and the calendar kept increasing. Ten years turned into seventy-five, and 2,000 pages into 15,487.

  Because of these delays—often stretching over several generations—reference books sometimes change their character over the decades. Some compilers make the same estimate that David Copperfield’s classmate did and realize that, at their current scale, their projects will take lifetimes, and they resolve to pick up the pace. Volume 1 of the first
Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, covered Aa through Bzo. Had William Smellie continued to allot pages at the same rate throughout the project, the result might have been ten or a dozen volumes. But plans changed: he rushed through the rest of the alphabet in just two volumes. The early seventeenth-century Spanish dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias is similarly unbalanced: the entries for A, B, and C are much longer than those for the rest of the alphabet. Covarrubias, who was sixty when he began his project, feared he might not live to see its completion.

  Usually, though, later volumes take a more leisurely approach to publication. In 1732, Johann Heinrich Zedler thought his Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon would occupy twelve volumes; by the time he reached the middle of the alphabet he had already published eighteen. Instead of picking up the pace, he slowed down even further: the second half of the alphabet took not eighteen volumes but an additional forty-six—“with the letter U alone occupying six volumes and the letter S occupying nine.”8 The would-be-twelve-volume encyclopedia eventually filled sixty-four. (Even that looks puny next to Johann Georg Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyclopädie oder allgemeines System der Staats- Stadt- Haus- und Landwirthschaft, 1773–1858, in an overwhelming 242 volumes and 170,000 pages.) And over the century and a half it took to appear, the Grimms changed policy on quotations in their Wörterbuch, partly because there was much more German literature to quote. The amount of detail also increased in the later volumes: to pick three related adjectives, blau ‘blue’ appeared in 1860 and took up two columns; rot ‘red’ in 1893 occupied thirteen; grün ‘green’ in 1935 filled twenty-six.9

  The Assyrian Dictionary, based at the University of Chicago, is an all-too-typical case of how reference publishing progresses. The project was mapped out in 1921: a six-volume dictionary of three thousand pages. But after the Second World War, when the team had worked for a quarter century with no volumes to show for it, the publishers began applying pressure. The staff was ordered to begin publishing in 1947 and to finish no later than 1957. Those deadlines began slipping almost immediately. The first volume appeared in 1956, and by then it was clear that six volumes would not be enough—they would need twenty.

  In 1972, more than half a century into the ten-year project, the team promised to finish by 1980; by 1977, when volume 14 appeared, the completion date was pushed back to 1984. In 1991, the project’s seventieth anniversary, the annual reports began talking about imminent completion and thinking about what the Oriental Institute would do next: “While the completion of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is the immediate goal … we have also started formulating plans for the future use of the data.” Still the work dragged on. In 1995 the editorial board was reorganized, and a three-year grant in 1997 made clear that the project would go into the next millennium. At some point the press informed the Library of Congress that the project would be finished by 2006—the date that appears in the catalog—but even that deadline was missed.

  A single volume tells the story. The editors started on P in 1994, thinking it the work of about a year. At first they seemed more or less on track: “Final editing of the P Volume occupied Professors Reiner and Roth,” the annual report for 1995–96 declared, “and they have finished editing most of the volume. The edited articles are prepared for final checking.” In June of the next year, they had “finished editing the last of the draft articles for the P.” But “During the 1997/98 academic year, the staff of the CAD continued to devote most of our energy to the P and R volumes.” The next year’s report opens with essentially the same sentence: “During the 1998/99 academic year, the staff of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project devoted most of our energy to the P volume.” Only in the 1999–2000 annual report were they able “to report that … we sent the P volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) to press.” By 2000–1 the book was in galleys. They were still reading those galleys in 2001–2, and in 2002–3 it was finally “being typeset.” Only in July 2005 did the volume appear. The product of eleven years’ intensive labor, P took longer than the original editors projected for the entire dictionary.10 The entire project was completed in 2011, twenty-six volumes and ninety years in the making.

  Things are no swifter in the high-tech twenty-first century. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was begun in the mid-1990s, with plans to finish by 2010. But by 2010, the editors had completed less than a third of the alphabet, and current estimates place the final publication date sometime around 2034—though the smart money says that when 2034 rolls around, the editorial team will still be valiantly working its way through the alphabet.

  CHAPTER 19

  AN ALMS-BASKET OF WORDS

  The Reference Book as Salvation

  John Bartlett

  A Collection of

  Familiar Quotations

  1855

  E. Cobham Brewer

  Dictionary of

  Phrase & Fable

  1870

  High-minded Victorians took reference books seriously as a way of improving the lot of the less fortunate. Nineteenth-century compilers wanted their works to be useful in as many ways as possible.

  One handy guide that would be owned by virtually every reader in Victorian England was Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables and Assistant to Railway Travelling (1839), the earliest (and most long-lasting) guide to moving around Great Britain on the newly invented railroads. George Bradshaw—born in Lancashire, England, in 1801—arrived in the world at nearly the same time as the locomotive, which was invented in 1804, and for more than a century, his name was synonymous with the technology that revolutionized travel.

  Another technology was behind another ubiquitous reference book, the phone book.1 The first one, The Telephone Directory, appeared in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878. In his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson had noted that the word Bible came from Greek biblion ‘book’, adding that “The sacred volume in which are contained the revelations of God” was “called, by way of excellence, The Book.” One hundred thirty years later, in a story in the December 1885 issue of Cassell’s Family Magazine, a character mused, “In a minute Charlie was in my boudoir, and was ringing to the Central Exchange. I looked in the book; the fire number was something—I forget what.” “The book” had taken on a whole new meaning as the telephone directory became central to people’s lives.

  Aristotle advised students in his Rhetorica to take good notes on their reading and to arrange them under topical headings, rubrics such as “on goodness.”2 Latin readers, too, were told to look for sententiae—that is, maxims, aphorisms, or memorable statements. These “sentences” were bits of wisdom that could be carried around and trotted out when appropriate. Good readers were advised to collect important quotations for themselves. Blank books gave readers the chance to copy their favorite passages. At their worst, these so-called commonplace books were little more than clichés mindlessly strung together, reflecting no actual reading or wisdom, just the ability to parrot moralistic bromides. Shakespeare’s Polonius, for instance, is a walking commonplace book: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be …” But these compendia were an essential part of a Renaissance education, and at their best, they encouraged readers to read with newfound attention. For a keeper of a commonplace book, reading and writing were linked activities.

  Commonplace books were originally do-it-yourself exercises, but eventually people began publishing collections of commonplaces. At the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, for instance, Desiderius Erasmus began publishing his quotations in a work known as the Adagia (Adages, 1500), which went through dozens of editions, growing larger with each new publication. Throughout the sixteenth century, these collections were bestsellers all over Europe. John Merbecke’s Booke of Notes and Common Places, with Their Expositions, Collected and Gathered out of the Workes of Diuers Singular Writers, and Brought Alphabetically into Order (1581) helped Protestant readers find their way around religious writings. English readers were especially fond of Italian compilations. Giovanni A
ndrea Grifoni published A Comfortable Ayde for Scholers, Full of Variety of Sentences in the sixteenth century, and David Rowland provided an English version in 1568; Francesco Sansovino’s Quintesence of Wit: Being a Corrant Comfort of Conceites, Maximies, and Poleticke Deuises came out in English in 1590. Sansovino collected his wit and wisdom from a range of classical authors, including Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, Sallust, Suetonius, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Sansovino’s 803 snippets appear in no particular order, but a topical index at the end directs readers to the entries on subjects such as “Affirmations,” “Agents,” “Old Age,” “Ambition,” “Art of warre,” and so on. His “sentences,” though, appear without citations—not even authors’ names. The result is a collection of wisdom, authorized by a list of great names, belonging not to individual writers but to the culture as a whole.

  Later came the single-author quotation collection. One successful example is Beauties of Shakespear, a two-volume work that appeared in London in 1752. Its compiler was William Dodd, then a deacon in the Church of England but eventually a prominent priest. Dodd spent some time serving as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield, the would-be patron of Johnson’s Dictionary, and he would write a Commentary on the Bible in the late 1760s. At the beginning of his career as a writer, though, he was interested in a different kind of scriptural exegesis—that of England’s greatest writer. Shakespeare’s supremacy was not yet taken for granted in 1752; he was still making the long transition from very good old-fashioned playwright to literary demigod. An entire reference book dedicated to an English writer would still have struck most people as a questionable enterprise. But Dodd insisted that Shakespeare was uniquely deserving of a collection of quotations, and he was proud to serve up “such a collection of Beauties, as perhaps is no where to be met with, and, I may safely affirm, cannot be parallell’d from the productions of any other single author, ancient or modern. There is scarcely a topic, common with other writers, on which he has not excelled them all; there are many, nobly peculiar to himself, where he shines unrivall’d.” Many of Shakespeare’s greatest lines are reproduced in Dodd’s Beauties. The famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy appears, for instance, under the heading “Life and Death weigh’d”; under “The different sorts of Melancholy” is this passage from As You Like It: “I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these.”3