Cawdrey had begun work naturally enough with the letter A, and so had James Murray in 1879, but Simpson chose to begin with M. He was wary of the A’s. To insiders it had long been clear that the OED as printed was not a seamless masterpiece. The early letters still bore scars of the immaturity of the uncertain work in Murray’s first days. “Basically he got here, sorted his suitcases out and started setting up text,” Simpson said. “It just took them a long time to sort out their policy and things, so if we started at A, then we’d be making our job doubly difficult. I think they’d sorted themselves out by . . . well, I was going to say D, but Murray always said that E was the worst letter, because his assistant, Henry Bradley, started E, and Murray always said that he did that rather badly. So then we thought, maybe it’s safe to start with G, H. But you get to G and H and there’s I, J, K, and you know, you think, well, start after that.”
The first thousand entries from M to mahurat went online in the spring of 2000. A year later, the lexicographers reached words starting with me: me-ism (a creed for modern times), meds (colloq. for drugs), medspeak (doctors’ jargon), meet-and-greet (a N. Amer. type of social occasion), and an assortment of combined forms under media (baron, circus, darling, hype, savvy) and mega- (pixel, bitch, dose, hit, trend). This was no longer a language spoken by 5 million mostly illiterate inhabitants of a small island. As the OED revised the entries letter by letter, it also began adding neologisms wherever they arose; waiting for the alphabetical sequence became impractical. Thus one installment in 2001 saw the arrival of acid jazz, Bollywood, channel surfing, double-click, emoticon, feel-good, gangsta, hyperlink, and many more. Kool-Aid was recognized as a new word, not because the OED feels obliged to list proprietary names (the original Kool-Ade powdered drink had been patented in the United States in 1927) but because a special usage could no longer be ignored: “to drink the Kool-Aid: to demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty.” The growth of this peculiar expression since the use of a powdered beverage in a mass poisoning in Guyana in 1978 bespoke a certain density of global communication.
But they were no slaves to fashion, these Oxford lexicographers. As a rule a neologism needs five years of solid evidence for admission to the canon. Every proposed word undergoes intense scrutiny. The approval of a new word is a solemn matter. It must be in general use, beyond any particular place of origin; the OED is global, recognizing words from everywhere English is spoken, but it does not want to capture local quirks. Once added, a word cannot come out. A word can go obsolete or rare, but the most ancient and forgotten words have a way of reappearing—rediscovered or spontaneously reinvented—and in any case they are part of the language’s history. All 2,500 of Cawdrey’s words are in the OED, perforce. For thirty-one of them Cawdrey’s little book was the first known usage. For a few Cawdrey is all alone. This is troublesome. The OED is irrevocably committed. Cawdrey, for example, has “onust, loaden, overcharged”; so the OED has “loaded, burdened,” but it is an outlier, a one-off. Did Cawdrey make it up? “I’m tending towards the view that he was attempting to reproduce vocabulary he had heard or seen,” Simpson said. “But I can’t be absolutely sure.” Cawdrey has “hallucinate, to deceive, or blind”; the OED duly gave “to deceive” as the first sense of the word, though it never found anyone else who used it that way. In cases like these, the editors can add their double caveat “Obs. rare.” But there it is.
For the twenty-first-century OED a single source is never enough. Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constituency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the OED. Nonce-word, in fact, was coined by James Murray himself. He got it in. An American psychologist, Sondra Smalley, coined the word codependency in 1979 and began lobbying for it in the eighties; the editors finally drafted an entry in the nineties, when they judged the word to have become established. W. H. Auden declared that he wanted to be recognized as an OED word coiner—and he was, at long last, for motted, metalogue, spitzy, and others. The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self-consciousness in the language’s users and creators. Anthony Burgess whinged in print about his inability to break through: “I invented some years ago the word amation, for the art or act of making love, and still think it useful. But I have to persuade others to use it in print before it is eligible for lexicographicizing (if that word exists)”—he knew it did not. “T. S. Eliot’s large authority got the shameful (in my view) juvescence into the previous volume of the Supplement.” Burgess was quite sure that Eliot simply misspelled juvenescence. If so, the misspelling was either copied or reprised twenty-eight years later by Stephen Spender, so juvescence has two citations, not one. The OED admits that it is rare.
As hard as the OED tries to embody the language’s fluidity, it cannot help but serve as an agent of its crystallization. The problem of spelling poses characteristic difficulties. “Every form in which a word has occurred throughout its history” is meant to be included. So for mackerel (“a well-known sea-fish, Scomber scombrus, much used for food”) the second edition in 1989 listed nineteen alternative spellings. The unearthing of sources never ends, though, so the third edition revised entry in 2002 listed no fewer than thirty: maccarel, mackaral, mackarel, mackarell, mackerell, mackeril, mackreel, mackrel, mackrell, mackril, macquerel, macquerell, macrel, macrell, macrelle, macril, macrill, makarell, makcaral, makerel, makerell, makerelle, makral, makrall, makreill, makrel, makrell, makyrelle, maquerel, and maycril. As lexicographers, the editors would never declare these alternatives to be wrong: misspellings. They do not wish to declare their choice of spelling for the headword, mackerel, to be “correct.” They emphasize that they examine the evidence and choose “the most common current spelling.” Even so, arbitrary considerations come into play: “Oxford’s house style occasionally takes precedence, as with verbs which can end -ize or -ise, where the -ize spelling is always used.” They know that no matter how often and how firmly they disclaim a prescriptive authority, a reader will turn to the dictionary to find out how a word should be spelled. They cannot escape inconsistencies. They feel obliged to include words that make purists wince. A new entry as of December 2003 memorialized nucular: “= nuclear a. (in various senses).” Yet they refuse to count evident misprints found by way of Internet searches. They do not recognize straight-laced, even though statistical evidence finds that bastardized form outnumbering strait-laced. For the crystallization of spelling, the OED offers a conventional explanation: “Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance.” This is true. But it omits the role of the dictionary itself, arbitrator and exemplar.
For Cawdrey the dictionary was a snapshot; he could not see past his moment in time. Samuel Johnson was more explicitly aware of the dictionary’s historical dimension. He justified his ambitious program in part as a means of bringing a wild thing under control—the wild thing being the language, “which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance; resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion; and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.” Not until the OED, though, did lexicography attempt to reveal the whole shape of a language across time. The OED becomes a historical panorama. The project gains poignancy if the electronic age is seen as a new age of orality, the word breaking free from the bonds of cold print. No publishing institution better embodies those bonds, but the OED, too, tries to throw them off. The editors feel they can no longer wait for a new word to appear in print, let alone in a respectably bound book, before they must take note. For tighty-whities (men’s underwear),