With marvelous brio, Simon Winchester has created a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. He serves up a lightning history of the English language -- "so vast, so...
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With marvelous brio, Simon Winchester has created a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. He serves up a lightning history of the English language -- "so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy" -- and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries, in which the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent half a century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making -- how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was,... See less 
Highlights:
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the OED 0198607024$25.00
