The Dewey Decimal Classification System was originally developed in 1873 by Melville Dewey. Among other things,

Melville was a librarian and a man who wanted to reform the English language. He was prone to

leaving the E's off of the word have, for instance, and writing the word pamphlets with an F instead of a pH.

This latter detail about Dewey actually shines a great deal of light on the atypical type of

pedantry that he celebrated. He seemed to want everything to be orderly and unified. So all of those weird spellings and inconsistencies,

of which there are many in the modern English language, well, he believed that they should be

done away with, and that he was the man to do away with them. Much of his work was written in this

reformed English style, including the documents that

outlined his famous decimal system. And beyond just the language in which he wrote about this

system, Dewey brought this same manic obsession with order to the Dewey Decimal Classification System itself, a system that was

originally published under the moniker, decimal classification and relative index for arranging,

cataloging, and indexing, public and private libraries for pamphlets, clippings, notes, scrapbooks, index rerums, etc.

An index rerum, in case you were curious, as I was when I first read that term, is either a tabulated

and alphabetized notebook where one stores interesting and notable things that one comes across,

or an index of subjects in a book meant to help

index indexes in a way. This is particularly useful in reference books, which contain

indexes of names and indexes of places and indexes of words, all separate from each other.

This decimal system of Dewees gained

initial popularity in the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, and it became nearly

ubiquitous from World War II onward, especially within libraries and similar institutions.

The backbone of the system is numerical, with each digit of the

number used representing some kind of class or subclass. Or rather, there are 10 classes, and each class

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