The Mean­ing of Every­thing The Story of the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­narySimon Win­ches­ter
Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, USA 2004World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This ambi­tiously titled book tells the story of one of the most ambi­tious book projects ever under­taken. The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary took 70 years and six edi­tors to reach a com­pleted first edi­tion. Those 12 vol­umes con­tained 414,825 head­words on 15,490 pages.

Win­ches­ter relates the sto­ries of the ded­i­cated men (and sur­pris­ingly for Vic­to­rian Eng­land, women) behind this gar­gan­tuan work. He includes not only the leisured intel­lec­tu­als who pro­posed the project and the vari­ety of peo­ple who worked directly on the OED, but also many of the thou­sands of vol­un­teer read­ers from all walks of life who pro­vided the raw mate­r­ial for the dic­tio­nary in the form of illus­tra­tive quo­ta­tions. Far from being a dull story, the tale of the OED’s cre­ation is one of clash­ing philoso­phies, incom­pat­i­ble per­son­al­i­ties, extreme ded­i­ca­tion, and the tri­umph of endur­ing qual­ity over ephemeral marketability.

Both this and Winchester’s ear­lier related work — The Pro­fes­sor and the Mad­man — are solid, enjoy­able accounts of a book that is any­thing but just a dictionary.