Catalog Search Results
Publisher
Vertical Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
Two remarkable men who created history with the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857 and was one of the most ambitious and revolutionary projects ever undertaken. Professor James Murray took on the challenge of creating the most comprehensive dictionary ever compiled but knew that it would take him and his team over a century to compile all known definitions.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"I'm reading the OED so you don't have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on..." So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED. The word lover's Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries. In 26...
4) The word detective: searching for the meaning of it all at the Oxford English Dictionary : a memoir
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"What do you call the part of a dog's back it can't scratch? Can you drink a glass of balderdash? And if, serendipitously, you find yourself in Serendip, then where exactly are you? The answers to all of these questions can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language. And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments, its quirks, and its quiddities than the former chief editor of the OED,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa. Writing with marvelous brio, Simon Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language and pays homage to the great dictionary makers from Samuel Johnson to Noah Webster before turning his unmatched talent for storytelling to the making of the most venerable of dictionaries - The Oxford English Dictionary. Here the listener...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
A New York Times Notable Book
The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history.
The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray,
...Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind¿́¿s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway,...