The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester Page B

“unskillful persons.”
    The definitions offered by these books were generally unsatisfactory too. Some offered mere one-word or barely illuminating synonyms— magnitude : “greatness,” or ruminate : “to chew over again, to studie earnestly upon.” Sometimes the definitions were simply amusing: Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie of 1623 defines commotrix as “A Maid that makes ready and unready her Mistress,” while parentate is “To celebrate one’s parents’ funerals.” Or else the creators of these hardword books put forward explanations that were complex beyond endurance, as in a book called Glossographia by Thomas Blount, which offers as its definition of shrew : “a kind of Field-Mouse, which if he goes over a beasts back, will make him lame in the Chine; and if he bite, the beast swells to the heart, and dyes…. From hence came our English phrase, I beshrew thee, when we wish ill; and we call a curst woman a Shrew.”
    Yet in all of this lexicographical sound and fury—seven major dictionaries had been produced in seventeenth-century England, the last having no fewer than thirty-eight thousand headwords—two matters were being ignored.
    The first was the need for a good dictionary to encompass the language in its entirety , the easy and popular words as well as the hard and obscure, the vocabulary of the common man as well as that of the learned house, the aristocrat, and the rarefied school. Everything should be included: The mite of a two-letter preposition should have no less standing in an ideal word list than the majesty of a piece of polysyllabic sesquipedalianism.
    The second matter that dictionary makers were ignoring was the coming recognition elsewhere that, with Britain and its influence now beginning to flourish in the world—with daring sailors like Drake and Raleigh and Frobisher skimming the seas; with European rivals bending before the might of British power; and with new colonies securely founded in the Americas and India, which spread the English language and English concepts far beyond the shores of England—English was trembling on the verge of becoming a global language. It was starting to be an important vehicle for the conduct of international commerce, arms, and law. It was displacing French, Spanish, and Italian and the courtly languages of foreigners; it needed to be far better known, far better able to be properly learned. An inventory needed to be made of what was spoken, what was written, and what was read.
    The Italians, the French, and the Germans were already well advanced in securing their own linguistic heritage, and had gone so far as to ordain institutions to maintain their languages in fine fettle. In Florence the Accademia della Crusca had been founded in 1582, dedicated to maintaining “Italian” culture, even though it would be three centuries before there was a political entity called Italy. But a dictionary of Italian was produced by the Accademia in 1612: The linguistic culture was alive, if not the country. In Paris, Richelieu had established the Académie Française in 1634. The Forty Immortals—rendered in perhaps more sinister fashion as simply “the Forty”—have presided over the integrity of the tongue with magnificent inscrutability until this day.
    But the British had taken no such approach. It was in the eighteenth century that the impression grew that the nation needed to know in more detail what its language was, and what it meant. The English at the close of the seventeenth century, it was said, were “uncomfortably aware of their backwardness in the study of their own tongue.” From then on the air was full of schemes for bettering the English language, for giving it greater prestige both at home and abroad.
    Dictionaries improved, and very markedly so, during the first half of the new century. The most notable of them, a book that did indeed expand its emphasis from mere hard words to a broad swathe of the entire English