scriptorium, n.

Furnival and loss of focus

The charming, energetic, but sometimes infuriating Furnivall took over after Coleridge's death in 1861. He added more volunteer readers to the 147 Coleridge had recruited but made little progress in the eighteen years he was at least nominally in charge. The chaos of his working space, the lack of direction for the sub-editors who sorted and organized the hundreds of thousands of quotation slips that came in, and the variety of editorial interests he pursued—he founded several publishing societies, moving on to new ones as his interests changed—led to a sense in the Philological Society and among the volunteers that the great dictionary project was fading into nothingness. When James Murray became editor, he found that the materials Furnivall had gathered were in such disarray that many were unusable, and many could not be found (it took Furnivall a year to find the address book which contained the names and locations of the volunteers who had the quotation slips).

Furnivall was aware that he was not the person to edit so large and complex an enterprise and in the mid 1870's began the process cf convincing another remarkable man to undertake the dying enterprise, in which Furnivall believed  deeply, despite his inability to make it the center of his scholarly life. (He had many other interests, including a love for sculling on the Thames, often in the company of young women many of whom were waitresses whose qualifies he admired. He became notorious for wooing and marrying an attractive lady's maid, whom he later abandoned for a much younger woman.) He remained a faithful supporter of the dictionary, even though his lack of tact often created troubles with the publisher and the Philological Society.

James Murray

 The person Furnivall and the rest of the Philological Society recruited to save the nearly moribund project was a remarkable figure—a very successful teacher at a separatist school just outside London who had made a significant reputation for himself as a student of language (and languages) while working as a clerk at a London bank. His interest in language began in his youth, in the border country of Scotland. He had been unable to continue his formal schooling beyond what we would regard as midway through secondary school, but his intelligence, curiosity, intellectual drive, and commitment to teaching others  led him into teaching and community activities that would have made him a a significant figure in the intellectual and political life of the Scottish border had he not moved to London because of his first wife's ultimately fatal illness. But his qualities made him an important voice in the work of the Philological Society even before his escape from banking. We'll see much more about Murray in the next two weeks. 

What they did:  Murray formalized the process of dictionary-building from his home near London, and later in Oxford. 

Volunteers:

Read: Volunteer numbers grew into the thousands, drawn from Britain, the United States, other English-speaking countries, and a very few readers from non-English speaking countries, including a Belgian who called his reading a center of his life (his wife called it work for "that wretched dictionary"). We will look more fully at some of the volunteers in a week or two. 

Report:  Quotations were recorded on standardized slips which were mailed to the editor, or sometimes to sub-editors who worked away from the Dictionary Scriptorium. The volume of mail to Murray was so great after his move to Oxford, that the Royal Mail installed a mail box in front of his house, dedicated to submissions to the dictionary.

Why? The aim was to register how a word was used in as many sources as possible, and through the growth of English from the end of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to the time of the dictionary. Here are Murray's instructions to readers.

Readers were now instructed 'Make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way, and also 'Make as many quotations as you can for ordinary words, especially when they are used significantly, and tend by the context to explain or suggest their own meaning.' Although the main reading was concentrated into the first three years, the flow of slips never wholly ceased. As each letter of the alphabet came to be dealt with, gaps were found needing to be filled, while all the time new books were published and new words coined. Eventually there were five million slips in the Scriptorium and it was years before sorting and incorporating the new slips into the original series was up to date. 

Murray, p. 178

Staff:  At the time he became editor, Murray was a senior teacher at Mill Hill School, just northwest of London. He constructed a metal building in his yard, which he called the Scriptorium. As the picture below (from Gillliver) shows, the original staff was small, Murray is seated at the center of the picture, not yet wearing the academic gown and cap he later came to use after receiving an honorary degree (perhaps  also to keep warm in the metal building). His son Harold stands beside him, holding slips. Behind Harold are the original pigeonholes Coleridge constructed twenty years earlier. As we will see later, the staff came to include sub-editors whose tasks expanded as the project developed.

Sort: 

Alphabetically:  This was a job that became the province of Murray's children, who eventually numbered eleven. The youngest son later described what they did:

[W]e received no pocket money as a matter of course, but had to earn it by sorting slips. Hours & hours of our childhood were spent in this useful occupation. The motive actuating us was purely mercenary: we wanted money for Christmas or birthday presents, or to spend on our summer holidays, & the only way to get it was to sort slips. We were paid according to age, not according to skill or speed. The standard rate was one penny an hour, but this rose to two-pence, three pence or even sixpence as you mounted up in your teens. 

The dictionary slips were the size of a half sheet of notepaper, written on lengthways. In the left hand top corner was a catchword (which was all that concerned us) ... The slips were all written by hand . .. except for cuttings from newspapers, which were sent in great numbers by Dr Furnivall with the catchword somewhat illegibly written so that we often had to read the printed paragraph to find out what the word might be. These slips were tied up in bundles of several hundred and had to be arranged in full alphabetical order.. The sorting into first letters was easiest: that into second letters was a little harder, because you often had to read the whole catch word. The final sorting and combining two or perhaps three bundles were hardest of all; but we became skillful with practice &, I believe, quite as quick as the junior assistants in the Scriptorium ... 

[Murray's daughter] Rosfrith recalled one of Furnivall's cuttings for the word 'toe-rag' and 'you dirty toe-rag' became a family term of abuse. [toe-rag did not appear in the  OED until the second supplement in 1986.] Sometimes the slips were on coloured paper and there would be a competition to see who could get the highest score in these. When they worked long periods it was an established rule that after each hour they would take a run round the garden.

Murray, pp. 179-180

Chronolgically and by sense The next steps were taken by the staff later thought of as sub-editors, who sorted the quotation slips based on the senses of the word they identified in the quotations. 

Here is Simon Winchester's summary of this stage

This team looked closely at each headword and sorted those that were spelled the same way into their different parts of speech—for example, lie the verb, as in to lie down, or lie the noun as in falsehood. Once this was done, the slips were further arranged within the new categories such that the quotations written on them were in chronological order.

The most crucial stage came next. An editor-sorter of even more experience James Murray being primus inter pares, of course would then look carefully at the quotations and from them attempt to discern the differences in the meanings and senses that the quotations showed had been used over the centuries. For an important word there might be several hundred quotations and it would only be by the very slow and painstaking reading of these quotations that a skilled editor could discern, could see in his mind's eye, the various ways the words had been employed over the centuries.

Sometimes the differences were obvious; sometimes they were more subtle; occasionally the differences were the merest shadings of meaning, the discernment and determining and defining of which were to make this one dictionary so infinitely superior to others. And to make sure the quotations did each reflect the meaning that a sagacious editor thought they did, each and every Station would have to be checked. Was what the volunteer reader had written accurate? Was the date he had assigned to it correct? If there were errors here, then the whole basis of the definition and the history of the word would be thrown into disarray, and any dictionary based on such inaccuracy would be made useless. Checking and rechecking the original sources, however tedious it might seem, and however seemingly disrespectful to the volunteers, was essential.

The assistants or the sub-editors or that special subclass called re-sub-editors who did all these determinings would pin together the slips that fed into each category of meaning and attach with the same pin a piece of paper that showed a first attempt at a definition of what the slips' quotations appeared show the word to mean. And then the sub-editor would take all the small pinned bundles for any one word and arrange these bundles chronologically, so that the lexical history of the word could be ascertained as well.

Finally in this multi-layered process, the gently fierce-looking pepper-and-salt-bearded (the red had faded to brown and was now beginning to grey itself), and black-velvet-capped James Murray, working steadily away up on his foot-high dais and from behind a semicircular and seemingly machicolated fortress wall of reference books, would receive the pinned bundles. He would make such further subdivisions as might seem to him appropriate, work into the mix the etymology of each word, add its alternate spellings and then the way that the Philological Society and common sense suggested that it might best be pronounced. He would number the bundles from 1 to 1,000 (in case they were ever to be dropped by a clumsy sub-editor or a compositor), and eventually he would perform the most important of all the tasks that a dictionary editor must accomplish he would write and polish and fuss with and burnish, for each one of the words and senses and meanings, what he divined as their definitions.

 Winchester, Meaning, pp. 115-116

The art of definition-writing was one Murray took very seriously. Mugglestone presents his struggles with grotto, which went through a surprisingly extensive series of changes, especially in the proof stage, when changes required expensive and time-consuming re-typesetting.  

Art, for instance, had been an entry with which Murray had struggled extensively in 1884 before finally managing to send it off to the compositors. Nevertheless, as soon as he was in possession of the relevant proof sheets, Murray comprehensively demolished his earlier work, engaging afresh with the material and the ways in which it might best be arranged. 'The renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comprehension which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, he later explained. 

Do offers an excellent example of this process. This was one of the most difficult words in the dictionary, having fifty-four divisions of sense in its final form and occupying seventeen columns of text. Unseasonably, Murray began work on it over Christmas in 1895: it would take almost three months before he was ready to see it put into type. The stability so laboriously achieved again proved transient. In real terms it was almost July before Murray finally felt satisfied with his representation of the word and its manifold meanings. The intervening time had been spent on the various proofs and revises which were changed, emended, rephrased, and changed again. Peter Sutcliffe's estimate that these preliminary versions of the dictionary are possibly the most heavily corrected proofs ever known' is scarcely an exaggeration. They were, in consequence, also to be extraordinarily expensive. Perhaps predictably, complaints about the 'cost of corrections' became yet another recurrent feature in the Delegates' discussions of the dictionary.

Mugglestone, p. 43

Two samples from the very large bundles of half-sheet slips suggest how things changed in the proof-reading process. The handwritten slips incluced all the parts of en entry, numbered as Windhester suggested. Here are two quotation slips for the adjective mechanical:

The entry for mechanical as an adjective is long enough to make the numbers 567 and 583 seem reasonable since each element  of the entry was sent as a separate handwritten slip. What's interesting is a change that puts slip 583 before slip 567 in the published  dictionary.

 6. a. Relating to or caused by movement, physical forces, properties, or agents (frequently in contrast to those of chemistry or biology); falling within the subject matter of mechanics, such as is dealt with by mechanics. Also figurative.

. . . 

c. Geology. Designating a process or the product of a process in which there is no change in chemical constitution.

1833   C. Lyell Princ. Geol. III. Gloss. 73   Mechanical Origin, Rocks of. When rocks are composed of sand, pebbles, or fragments, to distinguish them from those of an uniform crystalline texture, which are of chemical origin.

. . . 

 7. Of a person or action: working or operating like a machine; acting or performed without thought; lacking spontaneity or originality; automatic, routine.

. . . 

1818   W. Hazlitt Lect. Eng. Poets ii. 64   Versification is a thing in a great degree mechanical.

But in the second edition of the OED the order reflects the numbering on the slips, a sign of the ongoing revision of the dictionary.