Who wrote the dictionary?

Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry c ...  Show more

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (a ...  Show more

With 600,000 words and 3 million quotations, the Oxford English Dictionary is a massive tome. Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but the first edition wasn't published until 1884. Compiling the dictionary was a Herculean task, and James Murray, the editor of the dictionary, pu ...  Show more

With 600,000 words and 3 million quotations, the Oxford English Dictionary is a massive tome. Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but the first edition wasn't published until 1884. Compiling the dictionary was a Herculean task, and James Murray, the editor of the dictionary, pu ...  Show more

The story of the Oxford English Dictionary is really something. From its origin to its crowd-sourced literary quotations. Dive in today to learn all about the best dictionary. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

When you pick up a dictionary and look up a word, have you ever stopped to consider who it was that compiled such meticulous work? Was it a scholar, or group of scholars, holed up in a musty backroom somewhere dedicating their lives to the task, or a wide group of volunteers, cro ...  Show more