The Information by James Gleick
Not until 1613 was the first alphabetical catalogue made—not printed, but written in two small handbooks—for the Bodleian Library at Oxford.♦ The first catalogue of a university library, made at Leiden, Holland, two decades earlier, was arranged by subject matter, as a shelf list (about 450 books), with no alphabetical index. Of one thing Cawdrey could be sure: his typical reader, a literate, book-buying Englishman at the turn of the seventeenth century, could live a lifetime without ever encountering a set of data ordered alphabetically.
More sensible ways of ordering words came first and lingered for a long time. In China the closest thing to a dictionary for many centuries was the Erya, author unknown, date unknown but probably around the third century BCE. It arranged its two thousand entries by meaning, in topical categories: kinship, building, tools and weapons, the heavens, the earth, plants and animals. Egyptian had word lists organized on philosophical or educational principles; so did Arabic. These lists were arranging not the words themselves, mainly, but rather the world: the things for which the words stood. In Germany, a century after Cawdrey, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made this distinction explicit:
Let me mention that the words or names of all things and actions can be brought into a list in two different ways, according to the alphabet and according to nature.… The former go from the word to the thing, the latter from the thing to the word.♦
Topical lists were thought provoking, imperfect, and creative. Alphabetical lists were mechanical, effective, and automatic. Considered alphabetically, words are no more than tokens, each placed in a slot. In effect they may as well be numbers.
Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course. Cawdrey’s crucial models were dictionaries for translation, especially a 1587 Latin-English Dictionarium by Thomas Thomas. A bilingual dictionary had a clearer purpose than a dictionary of one language alone: mapping Latin onto English made a kind of sense that translating English to English did not. Yet definitions were the point, Cawdrey’s stated purpose being after all to help people understand and use hard words. He approached the task of definition with a trepidation that remains palpable. Even as he defined his words, Cawdrey still did not quite believe in their solidity. Meanings were even more fluid than spellings. Define, to Cawdrey, was for things, not for words: “define, to shew clearely what a thing is.” It was reality, in all its richness, that needed defining. Interpret meant “open, make plaine, to shewe the sence and meaning of a thing.” For him the relationship between the thing and the word was like the relationship between an object and its shadow.
The relevant concepts had not reached maturity:
figurate, to shadowe, or represent, or to counterfaite
type, figure, example, shadowe of any thing
represent, expresse, beare shew of a thing
An earlier contemporary of Cawdrey’s, Ralph Lever, made up his own word: “saywhat, corruptly called a definition: but it is a saying which telleth what a thing is, it may more aptly be called a saywhat.”♦ This did not catch on. It took almost another century—and the examples of Cawdrey and his successors—for the modern sense to come into focus: “Definition,” John Locke finally writes in 1690, “being nothing but making another understand by Words, what Idea the Term defin’d stands for.”♦ And Locke still takes an operational view. Definition is communication: making another understand; sending a message.
Cawdrey borrows definitions from his sources, combines them, and adapts them. In many case he simply maps one word onto another:
orifice, mouth
baud, whore
helmet, head peece
For a small class of words he uses a special designation, the letter k: “standeth for a kind of.” He does not consider it his job to say what kind. Thus:
crocodile, k beast
alablaster, k stone
citron, k fruit
But linking pairs of words, either as synonyms or as members of a class, can carry a lexicographer only so far. The relationships among the words of a language are far too complex for so linear an approach (“chaos, a confused heap of mingle-mangle”). Sometimes Cawdrey tries to cope by adding one or more extra synonyms, definition by triangulation:
specke, spot, or marke
cynicall, doggish, froward
vapor, moisture, ayre, hote breath, or reaking
For other words, representing concepts and abstractions, further removed from the concrete realm of the senses, Cawdrey needs to find another style altogether. He makes it up as he goes along. He must speak to his reader, in prose but not quite in sentences, and we can hear him struggle, both to understand certain words and to express his understanding.
gargarise, to wash the mouth, and throate within, by stirring some liquor up and downe in the mouth
hipocrite, such a one as in his outward apparrell, countenaunce, & behaviour, pretendeth to be another man, then he is indeede, or a deceiver
buggerie, coniunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts
theologie, divinitie, the science of living blessedly for ever
Among the most troublesome were technical terms from new sciences:
cypher, a circle in numbering, of no value of it selfe, but serveth to make up the number, and to make other figures of more value
horizon, a circle, deviding the halfe of the firmament, from the other halfe which we see not
zodiack, a circle in the heaven, wherein be placed the 12 signes, and in which the Sunne is mooved
Not just the words but the knowledge was in flux. The language was examining itself. Even when Cawdrey is copying from Coote or Thomas, he is fundamentally alone, with no authority to consult.
One of Cawdrey’s hard usual words was science (“knowledge, or skill”). Science did not yet exist as an institution responsible for learning about the material universe and its laws. Natural philosophers were beginning to have a special interest in the nature of words and their meaning. They needed better than they had. When Galileo pointed his first telescope skyward and discovered sunspots in 1611, he immediately anticipated controversy—traditionally the sun was an epitome of purity—and he sensed that science could not proceed without first solving a problem of language:
So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun “most pure and most lucid,” no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now that it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty; why should we not call it “spotted and not pure”? For names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.♦
When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all,”♦ he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures. Weight and measure were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than English, precisely because it was less worn by everyday use, but the Romans had not possessed the necessary words either. Newton’s raw notes reveal a struggle hidden in the finished product. He tried expressions like quantitas materiae. Too hard for Cawdrey: “materiall, of some matter, or importance.” Newton suggested (to himself) “that which arises from its density and bulk conjointly.” He considered more words: “This quantity I designate under the name of body or mass.” Without the right words he could not proceed. Velocity, force, gravity—none of these were yet suitable. They could not be defined in terms of one another; there was nothing in visible nature at which anyone could point a finger; and there was no book in which to look them up.
As for Robert Cawdrey, his mark on history ends with the publication of his Table Alphabeticall in 1604. No one knows when he died. No one knows how many copies the printer made. There are no records (“records, writings layde up for remembrance”). A single copy made its wa
It was overshadowed by a new dictionary, twice as comprehensive, An English Expositour: Teaching the Interpretation of the hardest Words used in our Language, with sundry Explications, Descriptions, and Discourses. Its compiler, John Bullokar, otherwise left as faint a mark on the historical record as Cawdrey did.♦ He was doctor of physic; he lived for some time in Chichester; his dates of birth and death are uncertain; he is said to have visited London in 1611 and there to have seen a dead crocodile; and little else is known. His Expositour appeared in 1616 and went through several editions in the succeeding decades. Then in 1656 a London barrister, Thomas Blount, published his Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue. Blount’s dictionary listed more than eleven thousand words, many of which, he recognized, were new, reaching London in the hurly-burly of trade and commerce—
coffa or cauphe, a kind of drink among the Turks and Persians, (and of late introduced among us) which is black, thick and bitter, destrained from Berries of that nature, and name, thought good and very wholesom: they say it expels melancholy.
—or home-grown, such as “tom-boy, a girle or wench that leaps up and down like a boy.” He seems to have known he was aiming at a moving target. The dictionary maker’s “labor,” he wrote in his preface, “would find no end, since our English tongue daily changes habit.” Blount’s definitions were much more elaborate than Cawdrey’s, and he tried to provide information about the origins of words as well.
Neither Bullokar nor Blount so much as mentioned Cawdrey. He was already forgotten. But in 1933, upon the publication of the greatest word book of all, the first editors of the Oxford English Dictionary did pay their respects to his “slim, small volume.” They called it “the original acorn” from which their oak had grown. (Cawdrey: “akecorne, k fruit.”)
Four hundred and two years after the Table Alphabeticall, the International Astronomical Union voted to declare Pluto a nonplanet, and John Simpson had to make a quick decision. He and his band of lexicographers in Oxford were working on the P’s. Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot, and polyamorous were among the new words entering the OED. The entry for Pluto was itself relatively new. The planet had been discovered only in 1930, too late for the OED’s first edition. The name Minerva was first proposed and then rejected because there was already an asteroid Minerva. In terms of names, the heavens were beginning to fill up. Then “Pluto” was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old resident of Oxford. The OED caught up by adding an entry for Pluto in its second edition: “1. A small planet of the solar system lying beyond the orbit of Neptune … 2. The name of a cartoon dog that made its first appearance in Walt Disney’s Moose Hunt, released in April 1931.”
“We really don’t like being pushed into megachanges,”♦ Simpson said, but he had little choice. The Disney meaning of Pluto had proved more stable than the astronomical sense, which was downgraded to “small planetary body.” Consequences rippled through the OED. Pluto was removed from the list under planet n. 3a. Plutonian was revised (not to be confused with pluton, plutey, or plutonyl).
Simpson was the sixth in a distinguished line, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose names rolled fluently off his tongue—“Murray, Bradley, Craigie, Onions, Burchfield, so however many fingers that is”—and saw himself as a steward of their traditions, as well as traditions of English lexicography extending back to Cawdrey by way of Samuel Johnson. James Murray in the nineteenth century established a working method based on index cards, slips of paper 6 inches by 4 inches. At any given moment a thousand such slips sat on Simpson’s desk, and within a stone’s throw were millions more, filling metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries. But the word-slips had gone obsolete. They had become treeware. Treeware had just entered the OED as “computing slang, freq. humorous”; blog was recognized in 2003, dot-commer in 2004, cyberpet in 2005, and the verb to Google in 2006. Simpson himself Googled often. Beside the word-slips his desk held conduits into the nervous system of the language: instantaneous connection to a worldwide network of proxy amateur lexicographers and access to a vast, interlocking set of databases growing asymptotically toward the ideal of All Previous Text. The dictionary had met cyberspace, and neither would be the same thereafter. However much Simpson loved the OED’s roots and legacy, he was leading a revolution, willy-nilly—in what it was, what it knew, what it saw. Where Cawdrey had been isolated, Simpson was connected.
The English language, spoken now by more than a billion people globally, has entered a period of ferment, and the perspective available in these venerable Oxford offices is both intimate and sweeping. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop has become wild and amorphous: a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech; newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; television and radio broadcasts and phonograph records. By contrast, the dictionary itself has acquired the status of a monument, definitive and towering. It exerts an influence on the language it tries to observe. It wears its authoritative role reluctantly. The lexicographers may recall Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic century-old definition: “dictionary, a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.”♦ Nowadays they stress that they do not presume (or deign) to disapprove any particular usage or spelling. But they cannot disavow a strong ambition: the goal of completeness. They want every word, all the lingo: idioms and euphemisms, sacred or profane, dead or alive, the King’s English or the street’s. It is an ideal only: the constraints of space and time are ever present and, at the margins, the question of what qualifies as a word can become impossible to answer. Still, to the extent possible, the OED is meant to be a perfect record, perfect mirror of the language.
The dictionary ratifies the persistence of the word. It declares that the meanings of words come from other words. It implies that all words, taken together, form an interlocking structure: interlocking, because all words are defined in terms of other words. This could never have been an issue in an oral culture, where language was barely visible. Only when printing—and the dictionary—put the language into separate relief, as an object to be scrutinized, could anyone develop a sense of word meaning as interdependent and even circular. Words had to be considered as words, representing other words, apart from things. In the twentieth century, when the technologies of logic advanced to high levels, the potential for circularity became a problem. “In giving explanations I already have to use language full blown,”♦ complained Ludwig Wittgenstein. He echoed Newton’s frustration three centuries earlier, but with an extra twist, because where Newton wanted words for nature’s laws, Wittgenstein wanted words for words: “When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and material for what we want to say?” Yes. And the language was always in flux.
James Murray was speaking of the language as well as the book when he said, in 1900, “The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself adown the ages.”♦ The first edition of what became the OED was one of the largest books that had ever been made: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 414,825 words in ten weighty volumes, presented to King George V and President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The work had taken decades; Murray himself was dead; and the dictionary was understood to be out of date even as the volumes were bound and sewn. Several supplements followed, but not till 1989 did the second edition appear: twenty volumes, totaling 22,000 pages. It weighed 138 pounds. The third edition is d
Cawdrey had begun work naturally enough with the letter A, and so had James Murray in 1879, but Simpson chose to begin with M. He was wary of the A’s. To insiders it had long been clear that the OED as printed was not a seamless masterpiece. The early letters still bore scars of the immaturity of the uncertain work in Murray’s first days. “Basically he got here, sorted his suitcases out and started setting up text,” Simpson said. “It just took them a long time to sort out their policy and things, so if we started at A, then we’d be making our job doubly difficult. I think they’d sorted themselves out by … well, I was going to say D, but Murray always said that E was the worst letter, because his assistant, Henry Bradley, started E, and Murray always said that he did that rather badly. So then we thought, maybe it’s safe to start with G, H. But you get to G and H and there’s I, J, K, and you know, you think, well, start after that.”
The first thousand entries from M to mahurat went online in the spring of 2000. A year later, the lexicographers reached words starting with me: me-ism (a creed for modern times), meds (colloq. for drugs), medspeak (doctors’ jargon), meet-and-greet (a N. Amer. type of social occasion), and an assortment of combined forms under media (baron, circus, darling, hype, savvy) and mega- (pixel, bitch, dose, hit, trend). This was no longer a language spoken by 5 million mostly illiterate inhabitants of a small island. As the OED revised the entries letter by letter, it also began adding neologisms wherever they arose; waiting for the alphabetical sequence became impractical. Thus one installment in 2001 saw the arrival of acid jazz, Bollywood, channel surfing, double-click, emoticon, feel-good, gangsta, hyperlink, and many more. Kool-Aid was recognized as a new word, not because the OED feels obliged to list proprietary names (the original Kool-Ade powdered drink had been patented in the United States in 1927) but because a special usage could no longer be ignored: “to drink the Kool-Aid: to demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty.” The growth of this peculiar expression since the use of a powdered beverage in a mass poisoning in Guyana in 1978 bespoke a certain density of global communication.