The Dictionary People (Sarah Ogilvie)

The Dictionary People is a fascinating book. It started when Sarah Ogilvie discovered the address books kept by James Murray during the original Oxford Dictionary project. The Oxford Dictionary was a crowdsourced project. The dictionary’s methods were borrowed, half a century later, from those used in Germany and France. Continental philology had already produced considerable works on the continent and Murray could learn from that, particularly from the work of the Grimm brothers. Murray relied on a large number of contributors, and kept their details in his address books.

Sarah embarked on a journey to find out more about all these contributors and her book is a great way of giving them credit for all their work and contributions. This crowd of contributors is super interesting. People from all over the world, some very educated, inventors, astronomers, and some less learned, but all sharing the obsessive habit of reading, collecting words and writing the precious slips that Murray would receive and use to build the dictionary. The book also tells us about Murray’s life, his own dedication of a lifetime to the dictionary, and how he embarked his wife and children in the adventure.

Sarah Ogilvie has worked for 8 years to create this book. I did not read it as a novel and read it little by little because it is so full of information and details that it takes time to enjoy it. But every time I put my nose in the book, I was fascinated by the way this whole dictionary was built, as well as the way Sarah Ogilvie discovered so much about the people and stories around it.

Congratulations to Sarah for this unique book. I definitely recommend it to all the lovers of words, of the English language and history.

Listen to the author presenting the book.