Word study

Christian Century, Oct 4, 2003

WORD STUDY: The English language has never had something comparable to the Academie Francaise, which attempts to preserve the purity of the French language. To the dismay of purists, English has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for malleability and expansion. Word usage changes over time, so that English dictionaries can never be prescriptive, they can, only be descriptive of how the language is used.

In Simon Winchester's fascinating account of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (The Meaning of Everything, Oxford University Press), he notes that Samuel Johnson's dictionary (1755) contained 43,500 words, but by the time Noah Webster compiled his less than a century later (1828) the word count had expanded to 70,000. That was far overshadowed by the compilation of the OED, which some call the greatest literary, achievement of all time: it contained 414,82.5 words, with 15,490 pages of text and 1,827,306 illustrative quotes. The project, using volunteers to search for words and illustrative quotes, took 70 years to complete. The OED was the brainchild of the Rev. R. C. Trench, dean of Westminster and later archbishop of Dublin, whose Synonyms of the New Testament is still in print.