James Murray

Johnson's and Webster's dictionaries recorded words used by people in England and America during their lifetimes. Then in 1857, an Irish Archbishop, Dan Richard Trench, came up with an idea for a remarkable new dictionary, a dictionary of the entire English language, a record - or biography - of each word for as long as people kept written records.

Work on thai began at Oxford University in bngland A group of volunteer readers — all people interested in the project but unpaid met one day and began dipping into books, the old Early English Bible and the reign of Alfred the Great (849-899).

In 1879 Sir James A.H.Murray became first of four editors. In his back yard he built "Scriptonum" where he worked over the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. His two daughters, three assistant editors, helped him and 2000 volunteer readers

In 1928 seventy-one years after Dean Trench had thought of the idea - -- the tenth and final volume, X-Y-Z, was published. (The Panama Canal during this time was dug, but it took only 10 years (1904-1914) to complete.) Some people were m service for it for 50 years.

(From The Story of the Dictionary by Robert Kraske, __ ________________ N. -Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p21.)

As for the second concept in dictionary-making that emerged in the 19-20* centuries — me replacement of prescriptive rules by a relatively systematic descriptive approach — it should be said that there is no clear boundary between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Both principles arc mainly an attitude of mind, and modern dictionaries usually use a mixture of both techniques.

Prescriptivists usually regard innovations dangerous or at least resistible. They frequently use restrictive expressions like erroneously, sometimes, used to mean, falsely, avoided by careful writers. Prescriptive dictionaries arrange senses chronologically. Elements of this approach are found, for example, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler (1926, revised in 1965) and in The Concise Oxford Dictionary (7^Ul edition, 1982), though the latter docs not employ chronological order.

Descriptivists quickly identify new linguistic habits and record them without indicating that they might be unwelcome. In descriptive dictionaries archaic words and senses are usually omitted, and the senses are arranged in order of commonness or so-called logical order. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) - - the most famous American dictionary — may be considered an example of the descriptive approach, which is widely used in modem American lexicography — though the order in sense arrangement is mainly chronological there.

The third concept implemented in English language lexicography of the 19-20* century -development of national lexicography in each English-speaking country - is best reflected in the history of compiling dictionaries in the US.

The first American dictionaries were unpretentious little books containing words used or spelled in a different way in the US. Noah Webster's first work, The American

Spelling Book (1783), was not an exception though it was extremely popular and brought him money to write an explanatory dictionary.

His first two attempts to write a dictionary were not a big success. Only his third attempt, An American Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes, was comparable to S.Johnson's dictionaries in its values, scope and clarity of definitions. Yet, it was strongly biased towards Americanisms, American way of life, had a rudimentary pronunciation system inferior to those already in existence and some problematic etymologies.

After Webster's death, his publishers commissioned a German scholar to rewrite Webster's etymologies and in 1864 the new dictionary gained international fame.

The Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language carries 450,000 entries in 2,662 pages and it aims to include all the words used in English since

1755.

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