Hardly Harmless Drudgery

A richly illustrated historical account of English-language dictionaries from the dawn of printing to the present day.

Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. They are works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devote themselves for years or even decades to wearisome labor. Dictionaries can become commodities in a fiercely competitive publishing business, and they can keep a business afloat for generations or sink it swiftly. They are also often beautiful objects: typographically innovative, designed to project learning and authority. The painstaking work of corralling, recording, and defining the vocabulary of a language has inspired best-selling books, both fiction and nonfiction, and even two major motion pictures. And yet its future is uncertain. The internet has taught more than one industry that it’s hard to compete with free, and the reign of the printed dictionary may be coming to an end. It leaves many to wonder: are professionally edited dictionaries necessary anymore?—and if they’re necessary, are they possible?

Hardly Harmless Drudgery includes accounts of the towering figures of English lexicography—the “Great Cham” Samuel Johnson, the American patriot Noah Webster, the Dumbledore-bearded James Murray—joined by a large supporting cast. The lesser-known works here include the small, unassuming 1604 book that is generally regarded as the “first English dictionary”; the early representatives of the “hard word” tradition as it evolves into attempts to cover the whole vocabulary; the vast Century Dictionary—an American enterprise that rivaled the original OED; dictionaries of slang and underground varieties of English from the 17th century to the present; and the first handheld electronic dictionaries from the 1980s.

Dictionaries also induce us to ask about the basis of authority. Who gets to say what is an English word and what is not, what words mean, and how words should be used? Johnson grounded his authority on the great writers in English, and the 114,000 quotations in his book make his Dictionary one of the largest anthologies of English literature ever compiled. Webster brought his own conception of great literature, imbued with a strong sense of American patriotism. The OED broadened the scope to cover what Murray called “Anglicity,” a global map of the language.

This book tells the stories behind great works of scholarship but, more important, it tells the stories of the people behind them—their prodigious endurance, their nationalist fervor, their philological elucubrations haphazardly mixed with crackpot theories, their petty rivalries, and their sometimes irrational conduct and visceral hatreds. A chronological narrative, covering more than half a millennium from the late 15th century to the early 21st, Hardly Harmless Drudgery is for anyone who loves books and words.