In July 1915, severely tortured by his poor health, James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. After his 36 years' dedication to the dictionary, his hard labour had taken a toll, knowing he would not see the project complete.
The poetic quality of Murray's final days is one of the many memorable tales in The Dictionary People. Beginning in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project - "the Wikipedia of the 19th century" - comprising 3, 000 people. The idea was to create a "descriptive" dictionary that tracked words' use and meaning over time, unlike its "prescriptive"18th-century predecessor by Samuel Johnson, which told readers how to say and use words. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how "rare, old-fashioned, new, strange" words were used. What is surprising about this fairly random method is that it worked.
The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie's book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, a former scholar who served as an editor for the OED, went into the documents of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. The Dictionary People is her work of detective scholarship, bringing the lives behind the names to readers.
Ms Ogilvie's book is full of intriguing stories. The presentation of the book is unconventional, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. There are 26 alphabetical chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors ( memorably, "K" is for "kleptomaniac" people who desire to steal). This is a clever arrangement, though it sometimes means that broader issues emerge only in pieces.
Essentially, this is a story about ordinary people. It is concrete proof of those who, to cite dictionary-helper George Eliot, "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs".