The Nineteenth Century

The 19th century was the heyday of British imperial power. While English consolidated its progress around the globe, the language was being researched and codified as never before. There was a great expansion in reading matter for a print-hungry audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Towards the end of the Victorian era, new inventions and technologies gave rise to new words.

In Britain in 1842, a year before the death of US lexicographer Noah Webster, the first moves were being made in a process that would lead eventually – a very long eventually – to what is arguably the most influential dictionary in the English-speaking world: the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED for short. In that year the Philological Society was founded in London to research the ‘Structure [. . .] and the History of Languages’. (London had actually been beaten to the punch by New York, which had established its own Philological Society as early as 1788, although it had not lasted long.)

Those involved in the London Society and in the early discussions about compiling a new dictionary are a roll-call of the great and the good in mid-Victorian England. They included Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School and author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays; Richard Chenevix Trench, a churchman who later became archbishop of Dublin; Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and Hensleigh Wedgwood, grandson of the famous pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood. These men and others were high-minded, enthusiastic scholars with a strong commitment to public service.

According to these Victorian worthies, the existing dictionaries, including Dr Johnson’s, were just not good enough. As Chenevix Trench pointed out to a meeting of the Philological Society held in November 1857, no dictionary yet published was truly comprehensive or thorough. Not one included a full account of words that had fallen out of use, not one gave a properly reliable history or etymology of a word, not one paid enough attention to distinguishing between similar-seeming words – and so on. What Chenevix Trench proposed was extraordinary. It was to produce a dictionary that would start from scratch and cover everything. Each word would be traced back to its roots and its meanings explained through all its changes and developments. Examples of how words were used would be sought not only in great literature (or any kind of ‘literature’, for that matter) but in all manner of printed resources, including magazines and newspapers. There would be no distinction made between sources. No discrimination, no claims that there was a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ way to use a word.

This was a long way from Samuel Johnson, whose own voluminous research included no books written before 1586 and who would certainly have rejected any newspaper as his word-source. A long way too from Noah Webster, who made no secret of his religious beliefs in his dictionary. This new English dictionary was to be a monument to a great language and a reflection of a country which in the mid-19th century was the most powerful, ambitious and confident nation on Earth.

It was also an attractively democratic plan, since the general public was to be asked to read for the dictionary, to track down words and their earliest usages, and so on. As Simon Winchester points out in his history of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything (2003), the project was on a par with other great Victorian enterprises. In contrast to the building of roads or railways or the physical apparatus of empire, the dictionary was a purely intellectual edifice, but one conceived on a heroic scale. It needed money, manpower and mental application, and called for immense reserves of stamina and industry from those involved.

The Great Enterprise Begins

Just how much those reserves would be required was to be demonstrated time and again over the following years. As with most great projects, there were unrealistic expectations about costs and time. But the English dictionary didn’t overrun its schedule by a year or two. Rather, it took more than seven decades for Chenevix Trench’s radical proposals of 1857 to bear fruit. Partly in an effort to recoup costs, the dictionary was published in instalments covering individual letters or segments of them (the first, A–Ant, appearing in 1884), but the full glory of the Oxford English Dictionary was not available in its completed form until 1928. Begun when Queen Victoria was some way from the midpoint of her long reign, it would not be completed until her grandson, King George V, was nearing the end of his.

Not surprisingly, the project came close to collapse several times. Problems arose over finding a publisher and then, once the Oxford University Press was contracted to the project, over keeping the publishers happy or at least not dissatisfied to the point where they would pull out. Costs spiralled. Intensive research generated yet more research in its turn. The first editor, Herbert Coleridge, died prematurely at the age of 31. The second, an eccentric called Frederick Furnivall, had many virtues but organization was not one of them. Fortunately the third editor, James Murray (1837–1915), possessed both longevity and a high degree of organization.

If anyone deserves to be called the founding father of the OED, it is the remarkable Murray. Like Noah Webster, he came from a relatively humble background and, also like Webster, there was a knotty strand of Calvinism in his make-up. Brought up in Roxburghshire in lowland Scotland, he seems to have been interested in almost everything from astronomy and botany to zoology, in a manner that was typical of Victorian intellectuals. To this polymathic tendency was added a wide-ranging facility for languages. He knew a dozen European tongues, living and dead, as well as sufficient ‘Hebrew [. . .] to read at sight the Old Testament’.

Murray’s Method

Murray’s appointment as the principal OED editor came about almost by accident after he dropped a casual remark to Frederick Furnivall, but once settled into the post he remained there from 1879 until his death in 1915. Despite Murray’s dominance of the dictionary compilation, it was no longer the one-man-band operation it had been in Dr Johnson’s day or in Webster’s. Many, many books remained unread in the quest for quotations to illustrate early or unusual word usages. Murray systematized the business of appealing to readers. He issued a pamphlet that was distributed to newspapers, bookshops and libraries not only in Britain but overseas. Its title is self-explanatory: ‘An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public in Great Britain, America and the British Colonies [i.e., Australia and Canada] to read books and make extracts for the Philological Society’s New English Dictionary’. (It did not become the Oxford English Dictionary until later.) Murray issued slips on which the readers, soon amounting to hundreds of men and women, could enter their replies in a standardized way.

It sounds like a demonstration of the old saying about many hands making light work, except that the work never did become light. Some of the hundreds of readers returned hundreds, even thousands, of replies in which they provided key words, quotations, sources and dates. These had to be checked and sorted by Murray’s assistants before they were examined by the editor-in-chief. Slowly, an order could be imposed on each word by seeing how its use had developed over the centuries. Finally it was up to James Murray to perform the most difficult and delicate task of all, that of writing the definitions. In this he was doing what Johnson and Webster had done before him but he was doing it with a greatly expanded base of knowledge and many more examples to work from.

At first Murray worked from a purpose-built structure that he called the ‘scriptorium’ (originally denoting the writing room in a monastery) in the garden of his house in north London, where he had been a schoolmaster. But in 1884 he and his family moved to Oxford. If anything, the work grew increasingly complex and laborious as it went on. Entries under the letter B, for instance, were far more complicated than the compilers had anticipated. One of Murray’s assistants, a clergyman, spent no less than three months on the simple monosyllable black because of all the other terms associated with it. Even in today’s Shorter OED, black-derived terms occupy more than a page. Two centuries before, Dr Johnson had observed that the more simple and commonplace a word – put, get, nice – the more complex and multifarious are its meanings and applications.

Bearing all this in mind, it is perhaps surprising not that the first edition of the OED took so long to finish but that it was finished so soon. The first Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1933. But a dictionary, of course, is never a finite undertaking, since new words are being added to the language literally by the day. Further supplementary volumes that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s were assimilated into a 20-volume second edition in 1989. And the work goes on, as it must not just for the OED but for all dictionaries of all languages that are not dead and buried. The biggest leap forward – a quantum leap, to use an expression that has only recently entered the English lexicon – came with the application of IT to do the work that would once have been done by the thousands of volunteers who combed texts and sent examples to the dictionary editors. Most texts are now available electronically. Indeed, some writing (like blogs) is only available in that form. No team of humans could hope to process all the material that is out there, but specific software programs are able to read, compare and collate usages. They can show which words and groups of words are gaining real traction in everyday English, which ones are fading away, which countries or regions favour particular formulations, and so on.

Levels of Language

The appetite for reading and information grew in the 19th century, and it was met in a variety of ways, from the ‘three-decker’ (i.e., three-volume) novel to the ‘penny dreadful’, a general term for cheap and sensational publications. Novelists such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins issued their work as serials in magazines in advance of publication in book form. Before the public library service became established, Mudie’s and W.H.Smith and other circulating libraries, so called because their books were ‘circulated’ among paying subscribers, flourished from the 1840s onwards.

There was a growth in genre fiction, from mystery to romance to science fiction to (in the United States) Wild West stories. The century was bracketed by two novels that made household names of their monstrous central figures, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Shelley’s book encapsulated suspicions of scientific experimentation going ‘too far’ and bequeathed an alarmist shorthand prefix to the English language – as in ‘Frankenfoods’ to describe genetically modified products.

Writers like H.G.Wells (1866–1946) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) were not only immensely popular but also familiarized their audience with authentic scientific terminology, whether it was applied to time travel or to cracking a criminal case. This did not operate just at the fictional level. In 1859 Charles Darwin published his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Within a few years, terms such as evolution and natural selection had become firmly established in the public mind and accepted as a logical way of interpreting the world. Shadowing genuine science was pseudo-science, as in the fad for phrenology (literally, ‘mental science’), whose proponents believed that a person’s character could be divined from the shape of the cranium. This was facetiously known as ‘bumpology’, because its practitioners drew conclusions from one’s head ‘bumps’.

The spread of literacy and all kinds of reading was not welcomed by everyone. As before and since in the history of language, English – or rather the right and proper use of it – was seen as the preserve of the few. An editorial in the short-lived but influential Yellow Book magazine in 1895 put the blame on education. It was not that there had been too little education but too much of it, and that it was the wrong sort:

What is obvious is this: that with the dissemination of ignorance through the length and breadth of our island, by means of the Board School [i.e., locally funded schools for the poor], a mighty and terrible change has been wrought in the characters both of the majority of readers and of the majority of writers. The ‘gentleman scholar’ [. . .] has sunken into unimportance both as reader and writer. The bagman [commercial traveller, salesman] and the stockbroker’s clerk (and their lady wives and daughters) ’ave usurped his plyce and his influence as readers; and the pressman has picked up his fallen pen, – the pressman, sir, or the press-woman!

This is the familiar ‘dumbing-down’ argument, citing the inadequacies of public education and the failings of the press (today the scapegoats would be the tabloid press and television). It is shot through with snobbery and nostalgia. Of particular interest is the writer’s patronizing imitation of a Cockney or supposedly common style of speech when, referring to the ‘gentleman scholar’, he describes how members of the newly literate class and their ‘lady’ wives and daughters ‘’ave usurped his plyce’.

Victorian Low-life

Victorian London was the largest city in the most powerful country on Earth. But hand in hand with prosperity, industry and national pride came poverty, disease and crime, much of it unseen or at least easy to ignore. One of the earliest investigators of the predicament of the urban poor was Henry Mayhew (1812–87), who visited London slums and talked to their inhabitants. He wrote a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle, describing everything from the sales patter of market traders to ‘ratting’ (a sport in which dogs were set to kill rats in a small arena). Mayhew is a great resource for documentary evidence on the Victorian underclasses, including styles of speech.

There was a fascination with crime, exploited by writers such as Charles Dickens (1812–70), while the detective story had its origins in works by Edgar Allan Poe such as ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). As in every period, the criminal underworld created its own jargon. The Victorian variety was especially colourful, with a stress on trickery and burglary. The brief sample below also gives an idea of the nature of 19th-century crime:

flying the blue pigeon stealing roof lead
fine wirer skilled pickpocket
gull a choker fool a clergyman
mutcher thief who steals from drunks
prater bogus travelling preacher
shake lurk begging under pretence of being a shipwrecked sailor
toffken house with well-off occupants

Trains, Cars, Cables and Telephones

It would take a long time for variants of ‘correct’ English like the Cockney style lampooned above to be accepted as perfectly valid ways of speaking. There was little or no snobbery, however, about the addition of new words to describe the new processes and artefacts that arrived with new technologies.

Sometimes it was easier to update old terms than create new ones. The coming of the steam age meant that various words that had existed in English for hundreds of years acquired a new lease of life: train, engine, carriage, station, porter are found during the late Middle Ages. But from now on they would be associated with the railway, which for the Victorians was not just a mode of transport but a world every bit as exciting as air travel was to mid-20th-century travellers. It was also a rapidly developing world. Within little more than 20 years of the opening of the first railway between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, around 7000 miles (11,265 km) of track had been constructed throughout the country. The term railway had been used from the 1750s to describe a track laid with rails (of wood, and later of iron or steel) on which heavy wagons could be shifted more easily. Now railways were found not only in mines and quarries but threaded across the land, carrying both goods and passengers. Locomotive is also found earlier, although no one quite seems to have known what to do with a word that was generally applied in a humorous sense to the act of walking. It took the puffing arrival of the train in the early 19th century to give locomotive its due weight.

The univeral car has a curious history. The word may go back thousands of years to Old Celtic karros, meaning a two-wheeled war chariot. It was used poetically by the Elizabethans to describe the chariot of Phoebus, the classical sun-god. Its application to motor vehicles seems to have been almost a chance affair. In Britain a name was needed as an alternative to the awkward ‘horseless carriage’, and car entered the language just before the end of the 19th century as a shortened form of ‘motor-car’ or ‘autocar’.

In the US, automobile (from the French) was already the preferred usage. Appropriately, the American word was assembled from different parts, even if there were only two of them (Greek autos = self + French/Latin mobile). The French, who were at the forefront in developing automobile technology, also provided a tool-kit of other driving words, from chauffeur to garage, limousine to coupé. When automobile entered English usage, linguistic purists were up in arms at what they saw as a ‘near indecent’ hybrid, half-Greek, half-Latin. Similar objections were later made to television, also a combination of Greek and Latin – a salutary reminder that, when it comes to the English language, apparently no protest is considered too silly.

It wasn’t only people but also words that went faster in the later 19th century. In 1815 news of the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo took four days to travel the 240 miles (384 km) or so between the Belgian battlefield and London. Within less than 70 years, an event of international interest like the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in the Pacific (1883) could be ‘seen’ on the other side of world almost as soon as it occurred, either through the cabled testimony of witnesses or through the evidence provided by scientific instruments. The new science of telecommunications had replaced the exhausted human messenger or the string of horses or the signal waved from hilltop to hilltop.

Telegraph had been used as early as the 1790s to describe a primitive signalling system involving flags – now called semaphore – but, like locomotive, the word really came into its own after a world-changing invention, specifically that of the electromagnetic telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1836. This ushered in the era of telegrams and cables (so called because messages were sent between countries by underwater cable) and of the clipped style of language known as telegraphese. The next stage dispensed with cables altogether and, following Guglielmo Marconi’s experiments, ‘wireless’ messages could fly over oceans instead of beneath the waves. Hence the wireless, which persisted for years in Britain as a rather dated term for the radio and which now has a new lease of life in the age of Wi-Fi (a play on words with the old audio-recording term ‘Hi-Fi’). The telephone was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, although the word itself had already existed for several decades as a description of instruments that carried sound over a distance, including such primitive devices as a foghorn. It did not take long for this new method of communication to catch on. By the end of the 19th century there were more than six million telephones in the US.

The Peculiarity of Telephone Conversations

Although the telephone did not have a direct impact on the English language, other than by the specialist application of terms like operator and exchange, it did bring about changes in the context in which English is spoken. No doubt early telephone conversations were rather stilted and formal – Alexander Graham Bell’s first words over the phone to his assistant were: ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you’ – but the invention gave people something quite new in human history, the ability to talk and listen across vast distances.

It hardly needs saying that a telephone conversation is not quite the same as a face-to-face encounter. There are no facial expressions or gestures to help the listener interpret meaning, although most people still smile and grimace and even gesture in minor ways when they are on the ’phone. Nuances have to be conveyed through the pitch and the tone of voice. As a result, telephone calls tend to be slightly more structured than, for example, a conversation between two people meeting in the street. There is a clear beginning, signalled by the bell/ring-tone, although (unusually) the dialogue is initiated not by the person who wants to speak but by the one who answers. There is also an established formula for finishing, which should leave no doubt the conversation is over but avoid the rudeness of simply hanging up.

KEYWORD
Dinosaur

The word dinosaur was coined in 1842 by palaeontologist Richard Owen to describe long-extinct creatures whose appearance could be reconstructed only from fragmentary remains. The early 19th century was a great age of fossil- and bone-hunting, as people came to realize that the Earth was immeasurably older than religious teaching claimed. Dinosaur was formed from two Greek words meaning ‘terrible lizard’ (deinos + sauros), and the more specific terms that came later such as pterosaur and stegosaur were, like many scientific expressions, also Greek-derived. Today, dinosaur is occasionally used metaphorically to describe a company or institution that is slow and lumbering, destined for extinction. But recent research has shown that the dinosaurs were more complex and intelligent creatures than their image in the popular imagination.