ABSTRACT
The key figure in this chapter is James Murray. It describes how the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived and put into production, with a particular focus on Murray’s role in this. The dictionary is compared and contrasted with other earlier dictionaries, like Johnson’s and Webster’s, and its contents are described. Its ambitious aim was to provide a total record of English from the twelfth century onward, showing how words came into the language and how their meanings changed over time. The OED is seen as part of the Victorian taste for searching for origins and for tracing how branches of the ‘tree of knowledge’ developed and were connected. In this way, the dictionary is seen to be doing for English what Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did for evolutionary biology.
