The first fascicle, containing the 8,365 words which James Murray and his colleagues declared was the entire sum of the English words between A and Ant, was published in January 1884—27 years after Dean Trench's speech.
Murray's seemingly dilatory state was as nothing when compared to the molasses-in-January progress in the scriptoria over on the European mainland. And he eventually realized it when, some years later, he was able to write approvingly of the speed with which his own dictionary-making machine was functioning. `We have already overtaken Grimm, and have left it behind.' But that was in the future: just now, matters seemed to grind exceeding slow. These first 8,365 words had been won with the expenditure of Stakhanovite degrees of labour.
Before describing just what was in—and what was not in— Murray's first fascicle, a small but significant fact needs to be pointed out: something that will make rather more sense when we come to the very end, or least to the most modern part, of this story. A detailed textual analysis throws up in these very early parts of the Dictionary certain slight idiosyncrasies of style, a certain lack of consistency, a vague impression of (dare one say it?) raggedness that, while invisible to all but the most critical readers, suggests a degree of editorial hesitancy, an unease, a lack of complete confidence, a quite understandable sense of the editor perhaps not yet being fully into his stride. With the publication of each successive part, and, when in later years, whole volumes of the Dictionary appeared, so Murray's confidence and that of his colleague editors became, as one might anticipate, ever greater; the curious details and faint clues that occasionally give slight pause to those lexicographers who study the work's early parts vanished clear away. The early letters of the alphabet might fairly be said to be the dictionary equivalent of a `Friday car'—fashioned not quite as perfectly as were some of the later letters, in much the same way that a car made moments before everyone leaves for the weekend might not be quite as fine as that produced when the assembly line was working at its best.
All of which serves to explain why the editors of the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, working to Murray's template, decided at the end of the twentieth century to begin their work with the letter M, not A. That way two things would happen: their own unadmitted inconsistencies at the start of their labours would be balanced by the perfection of Murray's middle-alphabet work; and by the time they reached a point of what they considered `stability'—most probably the end of the letter R—and then turned to Murray's perhaps ever so slightly ragged A, their own system would be so firmly in place as to negate any shortcomings from the nineteenth century.
What we are talking about here is slight and subtle, idiosyncrasies that would pass unnoticed by almost all readers. But the reputation of the Dictionary centres about its majestic degree of accuracy and perfection: it was to obviate any possibility of a shortfall in standards that the new editors decided to begin their effort in the middle, and not at the beginning.
There were more than a thousand columns of type set out in Part I, and a total of 8,365 words. Murray separated these into three types. There were 6,797 instances of what he liked to call `Main Words', each of which in his considered judgement deserved a separate article—words like advance, to pluck one at random from the fascicle, which has an `article' that illustrates sixteen meanings for the verb form and ten for the noun, and which takes up very nearly a full page of the Dictionary. Then there were a further 570 `Combinations'—doubled-up words (to follow the chosen article to its end) like advance-guard, advance-party, and, peculiarly close to home in the case of James Murray, advance-proofs. And then another 998 entries, in those early days identified by being printed in smaller and fainter type, were deemed to be `Subordinate' words, which were cross-referenced to the Main Words—subordinates like advant, which is an obsolete version of the verb to advance, subordinate to and therefore cross-referenced to advance, and which was first used by the poet and translator George Chapman 3 in 1605.
Almost a third of the 6,797 Main Words—1,998 of them, to be exact—were now obsolete themselves. They were all well worthy of inclusion in the Dictionary, however, for heaven forfend that anyone might ever stumble across a printed word in a book no matter how old or obscure and not find it in the Dictionary—it must be remembered that it was the intended function of a work like this to capture the language in its entirety, remembering all the while that one man's dead word may yet be another's still alive.
A further 321 of the words found lying between A and Ant Murray deemed `foreign or imperfectly naturalized'. By that he meant they were not entirely English, in other words—rather more tied still to their origins in French, Italian or `East Indian', but more or less current in contemporary usage.
The first part's first word—once the four pages devoted to the simple letter A had been accounted for, and after the entry for an occasionally used means of spelling the long a, aa—was the obsolete word for a stream or a watercourse, the noun spelled in the same way, aa. There was just one quotation supporting its use, taken from `The Muniments (the deeds or official documents) of Magdalen College, Oxford', referring in 1430, and in a Norman-French-Latin hybrid tongue, to a widely used communal waste channel in the Lincolnshire marsh-town of Saltfleetby, as `le Seventowne aa'.
The first properly current word in the fascicle was aal, the Bengali or Hindi word for a plant similar to madder, from which a dye could be extracted for colouring clothes. One of Murray's readers had found the word in Andrew Ure's Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines, published in 1839, in a sentence that provided a nice example of a classic illustrative quotation: `He has obtained from the aal root a pale yellow substance which he has called morindin.' 4
Then, notwithstanding the objections of Benjamin Jowett's anonymous Delegate friend, the words aardvark and aardwolf are both included, with three quotations for the former and two for the latter: Murray had evidently seen off with quiet dispatch the lunacy of the idea of omitting such words. Aardvark is particularly lovingly chronicled, as the first familiar and properly English word in the book should perhaps be: it comes from the Dutch word aarde, meaning earth, combined with a series of Old English and Old High German forms of the Latin word porcus, a pig:
Murray's definition, suitably scholarly and concise, reads:
A South-African quadruped (Orycteropus capensis Cuv.) about the size of a badger, belonging to the insectivorous division of the Edentata, where it occupies an intermediate position between the Armadillos and Ant-eaters.
By chance, the fact of Murray writing this summary of the famous Cape Colonial earth-pig points up one of the short-lived eccentricities of the early days of the Dictionary, a personal foible of Murray's own which was to land him in no small amount of hot water. Although by coincidence and chance he writes in the definition the hyphenated phrase South-African, he does not in fact permit the word African to appear, as a headword, as a listed adjective, in his Dictionary. He tries to explain why in his Preface, and one can feel him squirming uncomfortably as he does so: