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Go to spectator.com.uk slash summer.

Hello. co.uk slash summer. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and this week my guest is Sarah Ogilvie, whose new book is The Dictionary

People, the Unsung Heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary. Sarah, welcome.

Now, to start with, I think, to give these unsung heroes a frame and a place in this story,

can you explain a bit about what the structure for the making of the Oxford English dictionary was,

you know, how it differed from previous dictionaries

like Dr. Johnson's and so forth.

So it was 1857 and it was the London Philological Society where three men first proposed

creating a dictionary that included every word in the English language. And this dictionary

was going to be different, as you say, from previous dictionaries, because rather than something

like Johnson's, which was quite a prescriptive dictionary, this was going to be a descriptive

dictionary. This was going to be based on written sources, based on the ways that people actually use words, they wanted to

document every word in the English language, and they were smart enough to realize that trying

to accomplish such a massive task would be quite impossible for a small group of men living in

London or in Oxford.

So they decided to crowdsource it and they opened it up to everyone, not just within Britain,

but actually around the world.

And they asked them to read their local books and gather their local words and write out quotations from those books on small

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