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The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
This book tells the history of the Oxford English Dictionary from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The author, uniquely among historians of the OED, is also a practising lexicographer with nearly thirty years' experience of working on the Dictionary. He has drawn on a wide range of sources-including previously unexamined archival material and eyewitness testimony-to create a detailed history of the project. The book explores the cultural background from which the idea of a comprehensive historical dictionary of English emerged, the lengthy struggles to bring this concept to fruition, and the development of the book from the appearance of the first printed fascicle in 1884 to the launching of the Dictionary as an online database in 2000 and beyond. It also examines the evolution of the lexicographers' working methods, and provides much information about the people-many of them remarkable individuals-who have contributed to the project over the last century and a half.
The Ring of Words
Tolkien's first job, on returning home from World War I, was as an assistant on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary. He later said that he had "learned more in those two years than in any other equal part of his life." The Ring of Words reveals how his professional work on the OED influenced Tolkien's creative use of language in his fictional world. Here three senior editors of the OED offer an intriguing exploration of Tolkien's career as a lexicographer and illuminate his creativity as a word user and word creator. The centerpiece of the book is a wonderful collection of "word studies" which will delight the heart of Ring fans and word lovers everywhere. The editors look at the orig...
Treasure-house of the Language
The legendary Oxford English Dictionary today contains over 600,000 words and a staggering 2,500,000 quotations to illuminate the meaning and history of those words. A glorious, bursting treasure-house, the OED serves as a guardian of the literary jewels of the past, a testament to the richness of the English language today, and a guarantor of future understanding of the language. In this book, Charlotte Brewer begins her account of the OED at the point where others have stopped--the publication of the final installment of the first edition in 1928--and carries it through to the metamorphosis of the dictionary into a twenty-first-century electronic medium. Brewer describes the difficulties o...
The Meaning of Everything
'The greatest enterprise of its kind in history,' was the verdict of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in June 1928 when The Oxford English Dictionary was finally published. With its 15,490 pages and nearly two million quotations, it was indeed a monumental achievement, gleaned from the efforts of hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary people who made it their mission to catalogue the English language in its entirety. In The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester celebrates this remarkable feat, and the fascinating characters who played such a vital part in its execution, from the colourful Frederick Furnivall, cheerful promoter of an all-female sculling crew, to James Murray, self-educated son of a draper, who spent half a century guiding the project towards fruition. Along the way we learn which dictionary editor became the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame's Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, and why Tolkien found it so hard to define 'walrus'. Written by the bestselling author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne and The Map That Changed the World, The Meaning of Everything is an enthralling account of the creation of the world's greatest dictionary.
Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works
A philologist and medieval scholar, J. R. R. Tolkien never intended to write immensely popular literature that would challenge traditional ideas about the nature of great literature and that was worthy of study in colleges across the world. He set out only to write a good story, the kind of story he and his friends would enjoy reading. In The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien created an entire world informed by his vast knowledge of mythology, languages, and medieval literature. In the 1960s, his books unexpectedly gained cult status with a new generation of young, countercultural readers. Today, the readership for Tolkien's absorbing secondary world--filled with monsters, magic, ...
The Oxford History of English Lexicography
These substantial volumes present the fullest account yet published of the lexicography of English from its origins in medieval glosses, through its rapid development in the eighteenth century, to a fully-established high-tech industry that is as reliant as ever on learning and scholarship. The history covers dictionaries of English and its national varieties, including American English, with numerous references to developments in Europe and elsewhere which have influenced the course of English lexicography. Part one of Volume I explores the early development of glosses and bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and examines their influence on lexicographical methods and ideas. Part two pre...
Dow's Dictionary of Railway Quotations
Dow's Dictionary of Railway Quotations is an authoritative compendium of quotations about railways from 1608 to the present day. More than 3,400 entries are drawn from over 1,300 writers and speakers and a wide range of original sources both British and American—Acts of Parliament, poetry, songs, journals, advertisements, obituaries, novels, histories, plays, films, office memoranda, speeches, newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, and private documents and conversations. Here Andrew Dow records remarkable, memorable words—from the well-known to the abstruse, from the commonplace to the vital. The selected quotations are arranged by subject matter and searchable by speaker, subject, and keyword. Dow's Dictionary will inform and captivate railway enthusiasts along with readers interested in railway architecture, engineering, geography, and history.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Long before the successful The Lord of the Rings films, J.R.R. Tolkien's creations, imagination, and characters had captured the attention of millions of readers. But who was the man who dreamt up the intricate languages and perfectly crafted world of Middle-earth? Tolkien had a difficult life, for many years: orphaned and poor, his guardian forbad him to communicate with the woman he had fallen in love with, and he went through the horrors of the First World War. An intensely private and brilliant scholar, he spent over fifty years working on the languages, history, peoples and geography of Middle-earth, with a consistent mythology and body of legends inspired by a formidable knowledge of e...
Reading and Interpreting the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien
The world of J.R.R. Tolkien is one that is inhabited by hobbits, dwarves, elves, wizards, and dragons. As a young man, Tolkien created his very own language, and from there he went on to imagine an entire magical world and its detailed history. Students will take an in-depth and thought-provoking look at The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Simarillion, which provides the foundation for his classic works. The text includes an insightful analysis of the major themes and characters of the works that continue to fascinate new generations of readers.
Small Dictionaries and Curiosity
Small Dictionaries and Curiosity tells a story which has not been told before, that of the first European wordlists of minority and unofficial languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. These wordlists were collected by people who were curious about the unrecorded or little-known languages they heard around them. Between them, they document more than 40 language varieties, from a Basque-Icelandic pidgin of the North Atlantic to the Kalmyk language of the lower Volga. The book gives an account of about 90 of these dictionaries and wordlists, some of them single-page jottings and some of them full-sized printed books, paying attention to their cont...
