A history of the English Language

234.
The Oxford English Dictionary.
In the more enlightened attitude of the Society for Pure English, as distinguished from 
most purist efforts in the past, it is impossible not to see the influence of a great work that 
came into being in the latter half of the nineteenth century. About 1850 the inadequacy
51 
See Ann Bodine, “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular ‘they’, Sex-indefinite ‘he’, 
and ‘he or she,”’
Language in Society,
4 (1975), 129–46. 
A history of the english language 320

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THE EDITORS OF THE NEW 
(OXFORD) ENGLISH DICTIONARY 
Herbert Coleridge 
The nineteenth century and after 321

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Frederick James Furnivall 
Sir James A.H.Murray 
Henry Bradley 
Sir William A.Craigie 
C.T.Onions 
(see § 234) 
of the existing dictionaries of the English language began to be acutely felt. Those of 
Johnson and Richardson, even in their later revisions, were sadly incomplete and far 
below the standards of modern scholarship. In 1857 at a meeting of the Philological 
Society in London a committee was appointed to collect words not in the dictionaries, 
with a view to publishing a supplement to them. The committee consisted of Herbert 
Coleridge, Dean Trench (whose little books 
English Past and Present
and 
The Study of 
Words
had shown his interest in word history), and F.J.Furnivall, that great student and 
inspirer of students of early English literature. Furnivall seems to have suggested the 
undertaking. The most important outcome of the committee’s activity was a paper read to 
the Society by Dean Trench, “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries.” In it 
he laid down the historical principles on which a dictionary should be compiled. As a 
result of this paper the society decided that a supplement would not be satisfactory, and in 
January 1858 it passed resolutions calling for a new dictionary. A formal “Proposal for 
the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society” was issued the 
following year. The two principal aims of the new project were to record every word that 
could be found in English from about the year 1000 and to exhibit the history of each—
its forms, its various spellings, and all its uses and meanings, past and present. The last-
named feature was especially to be shown by a full selection of quotations from the 
whole range of English writings. This would of course necessitate the systematic reading 
of thousands of texts. A call for volunteers was issued and met with a most gratifying 
response. Hundreds of readers not only from England but all over the world began to 
send in material. This was the nucleus out of which the future dictionary grew. The 
number of contributors increased, and before the last part of the dictionary was published 
some six million slips containing quotations had been gathered. An important by-product 
of the dictionary enterprise was the founding of a society for the publication of unedited 
texts, chiefly from the Middle Ages. It was early apparent that the words from this great 
mass of literature could be obtained only with great difficulty as long as much of it 
remained in manuscript. In order to provide the machinery for the printing of this 
material by subscription, Furnivall founded in 1864 the Early English Text Society. 
Through this society more than 400 volumes, chiefly of Middle English texts, have been 
published. 
The first editor appointed to deal with the mass of material being assembled was 
Herbert Coleridge, already mentioned. Upon his sudden death in 1861 at the age of thirty-
one, he was succeeded by Furnivall, then in his thirty-sixth year. For a time work went 
forward with reasonable speed, but then it gradually slowed down, partly because of 
Furnivall’s increasing
A history of the english language 322

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FROM THE