Down at the Fill Sock
Sarah Ogilvie, an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, on the society that made it happen
When I became an editor on the Oxford English Dictionary 25 years ago, one of the first things I did with my small wage was to join the London Philological Society. It is the oldest learned society in Britain dedicated to the study of language, founded at the University of London in the mid-19th century. Most of the dictionary staff were members of ‘Fill Sock’, as we pronounced it. Four times a year, we caught the train together from Oxford to London, and attended the Friday afternoon meetings.
You could hear the hubbub of male voices from outside the room at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury. Once inside, most of the members were elderly men wearing tweed jackets. They looked pretty similar to the original founders of the Society who, in 1842, started their meetings in exactly the same way: cups of tea, followed by a lecture given by a member on a topic such as ‘The Dialect of West Somerset’ or ‘On the Etymology of the Latin Adverb Actutum’ (which means ‘instantly’, in case you're wondering).
Joining the Philological Society was such an important rite of passage when I became an editor on the OED, because it was at one of its meetings in 1857 that three members had come up with the radical idea of creating a new dictionary which would be different from all dictionaries before it. This would be a dictionary covering every word in the English language, and describing, rather than prescribing, how each word is used in its natural habitat, i.e. written sources. It was to be an historical dictionary, tracing the history of every word.
The Society was smart enough to realise that a small group of men in London or Oxford could not do such a massive job alone. They decided to crowdsource it, asking people all round the world to read their local books and to send in words and quotations from those books, on little slips of 4 x 6-inch paper.
When the Philological Society first proposed the Dictionary in 1857, they had thought it would take two years to finish; then they thought it would take 10 years; eventually it took 70. They had appointed Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the famous poet, to be the first Editor, but he died two years into the job. There is an apocryphal story that Coleridge had been rushing to a meeting of the Philological Society when he was caught in the rain. Sitting through the meeting in wet clothes made him ill, and a few days later when a doctor diagnosed him with tuberculosis, he is reported to have said: ‘I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow’.
After Coleridge's death, a flamboyant lawyer and literary scholar, Fredrick Furnivall, took over as Editor. 18 years later, he handed the reins to James Murray, a humble school master who had left school at 14 and taught himself all that he knew. When Murray died in 1915, on the letter T, he had no idea whether his life's work would ever be finished. It was, thirteen years later, in 1928 — all 12 volumes and 414,825 entries of it.
James Murray had tried to write the dictionary from inside his house — along with his wife, Ada, and their 11 children. Crowded out by all the slips and books and dictionary proofs, Ada put her foot down and asked James to move the enterprise out to the back garden. He built a garden shed made of corrugated iron, which he grandly called The Scriptorium. It was there that the world's largest dictionary of English was written. Partly dug into the ground, the Scriptorium was so dank and cold in winter that Murray and his assistants had to wrap their legs in newspaper.
When the Dictionary was first mooted, no one knew how the project would fare. It was a huge success, and I would attribute that success to its being one of the world's first crowdsourced projects. So many people sent in 'slips' to the longest-serving Chief Editor, James Murray, that the Royal Mail had to put a red pillar box outside his house to cope with all the post. The post box is still there at 78 Banbury Road, in north Oxford. There is now a blue plaque on the fence marking the spot where the famous dictionary was created.
The story of the adventures of the Dictionary are best told elsewhere. Suffice to say that it would never have existed without two things: the London Philological Society who founded it, and the thousands of people around the world who sent in words and quotations.
Whether the Fill Sock leads the world again in a radical project to rival the success of the OED is yet to be seen. In the meantime, I will continue to pay my subscription and to catch the train to London with lexicographical colleagues. In a world obsessed with social media and generative AI, I shall take delight and solace in the fact that there is still a place on earth where a group of men, and now women, in tweed jackets gathers for tea and to hear papers on — to name just two coming up in 2025 — ‘Beowulf and the Etymologists’ and ‘On the Imperative and the Optative in Old Japanese’. Optative relates to a mood of verbs which expresses a wish or desire, such as ‘let's’ or ‘if only’ — but of course you knew that.
Sarah Ogilvie is Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, and author of The Dictionary People: the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary.