When Murray began work on the new dictionary, the idea was to find the words, and with them the signposts to their history. No one had any idea how many words were there to be found. By then the best and most comprehensive dictionary of English was American: Noah Webster’s, seventy thousand words. That was a baseline. Where were the rest to be discovered? For the first editors of what became the OED, it went almost without saying that the source, the wellspring, should be the literature of the language—particularly the books of distinction and quality. The dictionary’s first readers combed Milton and Shakespeare (still the single most quoted author, with more than thirty thousand references), Fielding and Swift, histories and sermons, philosophers and poets. Murray announced in a famous public appeal in 1879:
A thousand readers are wanted. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory.
He considered the territory to be large but bounded. The founders of the dictionary explicitly meant to find every word, however many that would ultimately be. They planned a complete inventory. Why should they not? The number of books was unknown but not unlimited, and the number of words in those books was countable. The task seemed formidable but finite.
It no longer seems finite. Lexicographers are accepting the language’s boundlessness. They know by heart Murray’s famous remark: “The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernable circumference.” In the center are the words everyone knows. At the edges, where Murray placed slang and cant and scientific jargon and foreign border crossers, everyone’s sense of the language differs and no one’s can be called “standard.”
Murray called the center “well defined,” but infinitude and fuzziness can be seen there. The easiest, most common words—the words Cawdrey had no thought of including—require, in the OED, the most extensive entries. The entry for make alone would fill a book: it teases apart ninety-eight distinct senses of the verb, and some of these senses have a dozen or more subsenses. Samuel Johnson saw the problem with these words and settled on a solution: he threw up his hands.
My labor has likewise been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or interpret them by any words of distinct and settled meaning; such are bear, break, come, cast, full, get, give, do, put, set, go, run, make, take, turn, throw. If of these the whole power is not accurately delivered, it must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, these words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.
Johnson had a point. These are words that any speaker of English can press into new service at any time, on any occasion, alone or in combination, inventively or not, with hopes of being understood. In every revision, the OED’s entry for a word like make subdivides further and thus grows larger. The task is unbounded in an inward-facing direction.
The more obvious kind of unboundedness appears at the edges. Neologism never ceases. Words are coined by committee: transistor, Bell Laboratories, 1948. Or by wags: booboisie, H. L. Mencken, 1922. Most arise through spontaneous generation, organisms appearing in a petri dish, like blog (c. 1999). One batch of arrivals includes agroterrorism, bada-bing, bahookie (a body part), beer pong (a drinking game), bippy (as in, you bet your ———), chucklesome, cypherpunk, tuneage, and wonky. None are what Cawdrey would have seen as “hard, usual words,” and none are anywhere near Murray’s well-defined center, but they now belong to the common language. Even bada-bing: “Suggesting something happening suddenly, emphatically, or easily and predictably; ‘Just like that!’, ‘Presto!’ ” The historical citations begin with a 1965 audio recording of a comedy routine by Pat Cooper and continue with newspaper clippings, a television news transcript, and a line of dialogue from the first Godfather movie: “You’ve gotta get up close like this and bada-bing! you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” The lexicographers also provide an etymology, an exquisite piece of guesswork: “Origin uncertain. Perh. imitative of the sound of a drum roll and cymbal clash. Perh. cf. Italian bada bene mark well.”
The English language no longer has such a thing as a geographic center, if it ever did. The universe of human discourse always has backwaters. The language spoken in one valley diverges from the language of the next valley, and so on. There are more valleys now than ever, even if the valleys are not so isolated. “We are listening to the language,” said Peter Gilliver, an OED lexicographer and resident historian. “When you are listening to the language by collecting pieces of paper, that’s fine, but now it’s as if we can hear everything said anywhere. Take an expatriate community living in a non-English-speaking part of the world, expatriates who live at Buenos Aires or something. Their English, the English that they speak to one another every day, is full of borrowings from local Spanish. And so they would regard those words as part of their idiolect, their personal vocabulary.” Only now they may also speak in chat rooms and on blogs. When they coin a word, anyone may hear. Then it may or may not become part of the language.
If there is an ultimate limit to the sensitivity of lexicographers’ ears, no one has yet found it. Spontaneous coinages can have an audience of one. They can be as ephemeral as atomic particles in a bubble chamber. But many neologisms require a level of shared cultural knowledge. Perhaps bada-bing would not truly have become part of twenty-first-century English had it not been for the common experience of viewers of a particular American television program (though it is not cited by the OED).
The whole word hoard—the lexis—constitutes a symbol set of the language. It is the fundamental symbol set, in one way: words are the first units of meaning any language recognizes. They are recognized universally. But in another way it is far from fundamental: as communication evolves, messages in a language can be broken down and composed and transmitted in much smaller sets of symbols: the alphabet; dots and dashes; drumbeats high and low. These symbol sets are discrete. The lexis is not. It is messier. It keeps on growing. Lexicography turns out to be a science poorly suited to exact measurement. English, the largest and most widely shared language, can be said very roughly to possess a number of units of meaning that approaches a million. Linguists have no special yardsticks of their own; when they try to quantify the pace of neologism, they tend to look to the dictionary for guidance, and even the best dictionary runs from that responsibility. The edges always blur. A clear line cannot be drawn between word and unword.
So we count as we can. Robert Cawdrey’s little book, making no pretense to completeness, contained a vocabulary of only 2,500. We possess now a more complete dictionary of English as it was circa 1600: the subset of the OED comprising words then current. That vocabulary numbers 60,000 and keeps growing, because the discovery of sixteenth-century sources never ends. Even so, it is a tiny fraction of the words used four centuries later. The explanation for this explosive growth, from 60,000 to a million, is not simple. Much of what now needs naming did not yet exist, of course. And much of what existed was not recognized. There was no call for transistor in 1600, nor nanobacterium, nor webcam, nor fen-phen. Some of the growth comes from mitosis. The guitar divides into the electric and the acoustic; other words divide in reflection of delicate nuances (as of March 2007 the OED assigned a new entry to prevert as a form of pervert, taking the view that prevert was not just an error but a deliberately humorous effect). Other new words appear without any corresponding innovation in the world of real things. They crystallize in the solvent of universal information.
What, in the world, is a mondegreen? It is a misheard lyric, as when, for example, the Christian hymn is heard as “Lead on, O kinky turtle . . .”).