The original Oxford English Dictionary took seven decades and the help of thousands of people across the world to create.
But the delegates of Oxford University Press — who were funding the project — were keen for a more efficient approach.
"They were constantly putting pressure on Murray to curtail the number of words that were in the dictionary," Williams says.Williams researched the original dictionary for her book, The Dictionary of Lost Words.Author Pip Williams talks to ABC RN's Sarah L'Estrange about her fascinating debut novel, set during the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary.
"And those words, because they're not written down, because the people who use them are illiterate very often, and because there's nobody listening to them or wanting to record their experience, those words are lost to history, because they're lost to the dictionary.""If you want to solve a Scrabble dispute, you go to the dictionary and no-one will argue about the validity of the dictionary's meaning of the word.
"And all of a sudden I thought, well, hang on a minute. You can argue it, because the original source is biased."
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