Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Wikimedia; Getty.

The origins and uses of words have been of interest to us since early on, because the terminology around conservation is relatively young; also because words are essential to the cause. Stephanie Hayes, writing this review in the Atlantic, reminds us to keep paying attention to how we know what we know about words:

Who Made the Oxford English Dictionary?

A new book gives life to one of the world’s greatest crowdsourcing efforts.

The Oxford English Dictionary always seemed to me like the Rules from on high—near biblical, laid down long ago by a distant academic elite. But back in 1857, when the idea of the dictionary was born, its three founders proposed something more democratic than authoritative: a reference book that didn’t prescribe but instead described English, tracking the meaning of every word in the language across time and laying out how people were actually using each one.

As Sarah Ogilvie writes in her new book, The Dictionary People, the OED’s founders realized that such a titanic task could never be accomplished by a small circle of men in London and Oxford, so they sought out volunteers. That search expanded when the eccentric philologist James Murray took the helm in 1879 as the Dictionary’s third editor. Murray cast a far wider net than his predecessors had, circulating a call for contributors to newspapers, universities, and clubs around the globe. He instructed people to read the books they had on hand, fill 4-by-6-inch slips of paper with quotations that showed how words were used therein, and send them to his “Scriptorium” (the iron shed behind his house where he and a devoted crew worked on the Dictionary). The wave of submissions was so overwhelming that the Royal Mail installed a red post box in front of his home in Oxford, which remains there today.

One of the greatest crowdsourcing efforts in history—“the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century,” as Ogilvie puts it—the OED would not have been possible without this army of volunteers. And yet, for years, most have remained unknown. In his exuberant 2003 history of the OED, The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester devoted a chapter to the Dictionary’s contributors—not just the readers who sent in slips, but the subeditors who sorted submissions chronologically and by meaning, and the specialists who advised on specific terminology or etymologies. Winchester served up small biographies of a few key figures but lamented of the group that “their legacy … remains essentially unwritten.” In The Dictionary People, Ogilvie sets out to correct the record. A former editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, Ogilvie stumbled upon Murray’s address books while passing time in the Dictionary’s archives. Upon learning that the number of volunteers wasn’t merely hundreds (as scholars long believed) but some 3,000, she became determined to track each of them down…

Read the whole review here.