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This unique and celebrated biography describes how a largely self-educated boy from a small village in Scotland entered the world of scholarship and became the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and a great lexicographer. It also provides an absorbing account of how the dictionary was written, the personalities of the people working on it, and the endless difficulties that nearly led to the whole enterprise being abandoned. "It is a magnificent story of a magnificent man, one of the finest biographies of the twentieth century, as its subject was one of the finest human beings of the nineteenth." --Anthony Burgess "A moving and dramatic story . . . sometimes tragic, often comic, ul...
This unique and celebrated biography describes how a largely self-educated boy from a small village in Scotland entered the world of scholarship and became the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a lexicographer greater by far than Dr. Johnson. It also provides an absorbing account of how the dictionary was written, the personalities of the people working on it, and the endless difficulties which nearly led to the whole enterprise being abandoned.
An account of the life and scholarly career of the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and of the writing of the Dictionary itself
Excerpt from A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. 9: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society; Part II, Su-Th In the Latin and Greek element of the vocabulary the most striking feature is the number and importance of the prefixes that have required more or less lengthy treatment; these are s/ré (with its variants s// win, suf slum, sn/7 smu, sz/s szz/wz sflz (with its variants sy, Sj'lll', sj's The great majority of the words from Latin, Greek, and French are compounds of one or other of these prefixes, and the list of them includes many of common literary and colloquial currency, and many of considerable rank in the terminology of the arts a...
"The Evolution of English Lexicography" by way of James A. H. Murray is a complete take a look at that strains the development and history of English dictionaries and lexicography. Murray's paintings offer a meticulous exam of the evolution of lexicography from its early beginnings to the sophisticated dictionaries of the nineteenth century. In this seminal paintings, Murray analyzes the contributions of top notch lexicographers, the evolution of dictionary-making techniques, and the cultural and linguistic influences which have shaped the English lexicon. Murray's understanding as a lexicographer and philologist shines thru as he delves into the intricacies of compiling dictionaries and def...
"We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium -- the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it -- and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W.C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project -- a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivaled uber-dictionary. Book jacket."--Jacket.
Dictionaries are a powerful genre, perceived as authoritative and objective records of the language, impervious to personal bias. But who makes dictionaries shapes both how they are constructed and how they are used. Tracing the craft of dictionary making from the fifteenth century to the present day, this book explores the vital but little-known significance of women and gender in the creation of English language dictionaries. Women worked as dictionary patrons, collaborators, readers, compilers, and critics, while gender ideologies served, at turns, to prevent, secure, and veil women's involvements and innovations in dictionary making. Combining historical, rhetorical, and feminist methods, this is a monumental recovery of six centuries of women's participation in dictionary making and a robust investigation of how the social life of the genre is influenced by the social expectations of gender.
Murray's History of Chess is regarded as the most authoritative and most comprehensive history of the game. Murray's aim is threefold: to present as complete a record as is possible of the varieties of chess that exist or have existed in different parts of the world; to investigate the ultimate origin of these games and the circumstances of the invention of chess; and to trace the development of the modern European game from the first appearance of its ancestor, the Indian chaturanga, in the beginning of the 7th century. The first part of the book describes the history of the Asiatic varieties of chess, the Arabic and Persian literature on chess, and the theory and practice of the game of shatranj. The second part is concerned with chess in Europe in the Middle Ages, its role in literature and in the moralities, and with medieval chess problems, leading up to the beginning of modern chess and the history of the modern game through to the 19th century.