…the word African was one of the earliest instances in which the question of admission or exclusion arose with regard to an important adjective derived from a geographical proper name. After much careful consideration, and consultation with advisers, it was decided (perhaps by a too rigid application of first principles) to omit the word, as having really no more claims to inclusion than Algerian, Austrian or Bulgarian. But, when American was reached, some months afterwards, it was seen that Americanize and Americanism must of necessity be included, and that these (`with the Americanising of our institutions') could not be explained without treating American, and explaining its restricted application to the United States. American was accordingly admitted. Then the question arose, whether the exclusion of African was consistent with the inclusion of American; but the question came too late; African had been actually omitted, on its own merits.
Murray realized his misjudgement swiftly. He eventually over-ruled himself, and decided that African was after all to be included in the first Supplement, which would be published some five years after all the work on the Dictionary had been done in 1933. But its absence from Part I, and then again from the First Edition's Volume Iwhich was published in 1888 and which includes all of the 31,254 words that begin with A and B, is very noticeable. (It should by rights have been located between an obsolete word for `devour', afrete, and the word for `face-to-face', afront. There is otherwise no word listed that begins with the letters Afri-, and most decidedly not that which describes what once was known, from H. M. Stanley's popular book, as `the Dark Continent'. 5 ) It can be seen today as an error—or a wrong-headed judgement-call— which stands as mute testimony to the complexities of the decision-making which so stimulated, and yet so wearied, James Murray, as he steadily and manfully wound his way through the untrodden forests of the language. 6
Murray himself—a man never averse to revealing to all the trials of his task—offers in the Preface a snapshot of the difficulties involved in being so much of a pioneer:
Our attempts lay no claim to perfection; but they represent the most that could be done in the time and with the data at our command. The … direction in which much time has been consumed is the elucidation of the meaning of obscure terms, sometimes obsolete, sometimes current, belonging to matter of history, customs, fashions, trade or manufactures. In many cases, the only thing known about these was contained in the quotations, often merely allusive, which had been collected by the diligence of our readers. They were to be found in no dictionary, or, if mentioned in some, were explained in a way which our quotations evidently showed to be erroneous. The difficulty of obtaining first-hand and authoritative information about these has often been immense, and sometimes insurmountable. Ten, twenty or thirty letters have sometimes been written to persons who, it was thought, might possibly know, or succeed in finding out, something definite on the subject; and often weeks have passed, and `copy' advances into the state of `proof', and `proof' into `revise', and `revise' even into `final', before any results could be obtained. It is incredible what labour has had to be expended, sometimes, to find out facts for an article which occupies not five or six lines; or even to be able to write the words `Derivation unknown', as the net outcome of hours of research and of testing the statements put forth without hesitation in other works.
Elisabeth Murray, in her classic biography of her grandfather, recalls a lecture in which he listed a typical daily bout of letterwriting:
I write to the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew about the first record of the name of an exotic plant; to a quay-side merchant at Newcastle about the Keels on the Tyne; to a Jesuit father on a point of Roman Catholic Divinity; to the Secretary of the Astronomical Society about the primum-mobile or the solar constant; to the Editor of The Times about a letter of the year 1620 containing the first mention of Punch [the beverage]; to a Wesleyan minister about the itineracy; to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it, 7 to the Sporting News about a term in horse-racing, or pugilism; or the invention of the word hooligan in June 1898; to the Librarian of the Cambridge University Library for the reading of the first edition of a rare book; to the Deputy Keeper of the Rolls for the exact reading of a historical MSwhich we have reason to suspect has been inaccurately quoted by Mr. Froude; to a cotton manufacturer for a definition of Jaconet, or a technical term of cotton printing; to George Meredith to ask what is the meaning of a line of one of his poems; to Thomas Hardy to ask what is the meaning of a word terminatory in one of his novels; to the Editor of the New York Nation for the history of an American political term; to the administrator of the Andaman Islands for an exact reference to an early quotation which he has sent for the word Jute, or the history of Talapoin; to the Mayor of Yarmouth about the word bloater in the herring fishery; to the Chief Rabbi for the latest views upon the Hebrew Jubilee; to a celebrated collector of popular songs for the authorship of `We don't want to fight, But by Jingo if we do,' which gave his name to the political Jingo.
It is worth remembering that all of this correspondence had to be written by hand; and that the letters had, what is more, to be written twice. Although carbon paper had been invented by an Italian in 1806, its use for the making of copies of handwritten letters had not been perfected, and most courteous correspondents—like Murray, who was notably so, and who wrote in some kind of elegant copperplate—preferred the tribulations of simply writing everything out once again, of making a fair copy.
Many of the letters he wrote were to celebrated figures—Lord Tennyson preeminent among them. Once he had to write to Robert Browning, asking the meaning of the word apparitional. Browning's reply confused him, and in later years Murray was mildly scathing about the poet's constant use of words `without regard to their proper meaning'—a habit, Murray complained, that `added greatly to the difficulties of the Dictionary'.
Yet for all these vexing aspects of his work, the triumph of the first part of the Dictionary was plain to see. It was abundantly clear, even from this one small part, that what would eventually be published was the catalogue of a truly vast emporium of words. Here were the wonderful and the ordinary, cheek by jowl—acatalectic and adhesion, agnate and allumine, animal, answer, and ant. And by ant Murray did not only define the `social insect of the Hymenopterous order'—he included the prefix ant- as a contraction of anti-, and used in words like antacid, and the suffix -ant, attached to form words like tenant, valiant, claimant, and pleasant.
True, there were critics aplenty, and as soon as the work was published letters started trickling in to the Scriptorium, triumphantly listing earlier quotations than those used, or alleging (usually erroneously) that words had been missed out. Murray, a prickly man at the best of times, was extremely sensitive to any criticism. But his confidence in his work was clearly burgeoning—and it allowed him (or so a few fans of Murray like to think) the luxury of inserting within the scores of pages and definitions and quotations in that first fascicle one of the very few witticisms that is known to exist in the complete work.
When pressed, lexicographers involved in the making of the book remark that such humour as is to be found in the OED was placed there `only inadvertently', and so there almost probably was never any humorous intention on Murray's part—none, for instance, as there plainly was in the writing of the single-volume Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary of 1901, which had droll entries such as that for éclair: `a cake, long in shape but short in duration'.