G
Guest
Guest
Hit wrong fucking key, so have to edit. Anyway, I get the OED's online newletter and found this interesting. - Perdita
19 April 2004: a day in the life of the OED
Bernadette Paton, Associate Editor
On Monday I edited OED entries for words beginning with pha-. I found out all there is to know about Greek phalanxes (a soldier in a phalanx, known as a phalangite, was allowed to occupy no more than 1.5 feet of space when marching — sounds a tight squeeze but they say ancient Greeks were quite small). I also learned about phalaricas (or phalaricae) — ancient Molotov cocktails consisting of a javelin wrapped in tow and pitch, set alight and hurled at the enemy. But my word of the day was phalanstery. Phalansteries were early nineteenth-century communes established by the French socialist Charles Fourier and run entirely on egalitarian principles. Sadly, they met the fate of most such enterprises, and I've labelled the word ‘Now hist.’ (i.e. it's still used, but only in a historical context).
Veronica Hurst, Principal Editor (Bibliography)
I worked through some of the flurry of contributions helping us to identify the remaining incompletely cited quotations taken by OED from Johnson's Dictionary (see my article in the March issue of OED News, which I hope may have been the starting point for some of these contributions). All in all we have been able to tick off another thirty or so of these ‘Johnson quotations’. Processing a contribution would typically involve: checking full titles and dates of the reported source texts in catalogues to arrive at the correct citation style for OED; calling up the relevant headword in OED; adding the bibliographical details supplied by the readers to the hitherto unidentified Johnson quotations; notifying Fred Nicholls of the Johnson Project in case they're quotations he hasn't yet been able to identify; and arranging for the necessary changes to be made to the list of Johnson quotations as it appears on our web site, ‘greying out’ those quotations that have now been identified and adding the name of the reader as the discoverer thereof. [Editor's note: as of the time of writing, further contributions have increased the number of newly-identified Johnson quotations to 67, leaving only 229 still to be found. Thank you to all our readers!]
Samantha Schad, Senior Assistant Editor (Etymology)
On Monday I did penance. Actually, I revised the Latin component of the etymology of the word penance. This also involved looking at the entry for penitence; Latin paenitentia is the ultimate source of both words.
Katherine Martin, Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)
I was working on a draft entry for the verb other (and the related adjective othered). Due to the complex and philosophical nature of these terms (and our mutual interest in the subject matter), Abigail and I decided to split them up — she took on the noun othering — so that we could discuss the definitions in detail and share our research.
Abigail Zitin, Senior Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)
Apart from othering (see above), I have been preoccupied with participles. Assigned the simple task of putting together a definition and quotation paragraph for the literal sense of the adjectival compound ‘oiled-up’ — which one would expect to appear in print well before the more fanciful metaphorical extensions of the term — I've hit upon a possible first quotation from Dickens' Hard Times: ‘All the melancholy-mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day's monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.’ But is this, on second thought, more verb than adjective, with its implied ‘elephants [that had been]...oiled up’? It would be a shame not to be able to use the quotation: it would make a fine counterbalance to the ‘oiled-up love god’ who features in the last quotation in my draft entry, from a 2002 issue of Smash Hits magazine.
Andreas Groeger, Assistant Editor (Etymology)
I spent a very interesting time investigating the etymology of the noun panzer, eagerly searching for early uses of the word in its ‘tank’ sense in German. The earliest German occurrence I've found so far is from 1934, but this can probably be improved upon!
Catherine Bailey, Senior Assistant Editor
On Monday I arrived to a diary full of meetings concerning a new editing system for the OED, the development of which is involving a great deal of input from the staff of the project. It was quite an atypical OED day; I spent all day talking about the processes of editing, finding quotations, and tracking workflow, and no time at all actually doing those things.
Andrew Ball, Senior Editor
I tried to ascertain whether all of the quotations in OED2 cited in the form ‘a1500 P. Johnston Thre Deid Powis’, which appear to have been taken from the version of this old Scots poem given in a folio manuscript known as the ‘Maitland Folio’, could be quoted instead from the ‘Bannatyne manuscript’, and attributed to Robert Henryson. They could.
Bill Trumble, Associate Editor
Science revision for the word pen-fish: three sketchy senses in OED (‘sea-pen’; ‘squid’; ‘porgy’); no twentieth-century quotations. So I searched ECCO [Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a valuable electronic resource] for earlier examples, and found some, but only for a fourth sense (an eelpout). Other online resources yielded examples only for the sense ‘fish raised in a pen’, another entry altogether if I decide to add it. A bitty entry made bittier. (Typical fish.)
Nick Shearing, Senior Editor (New Words)
The Contemporary Reading Programme regularly looks at recent issues of magazines, and today I prepared some of the magazines that have recently been read (and noteworthy words highlighted) for keying. This entailed giving suitable OED citation styles for such titles as Sporting Gun, Diva, Prediction, Knowledge.co.uk Magazine, Scouting Magazine, Mixmag, and Loaded, and attaching appropriate subject labelling to these sources and their related catchwords. I also edited a number of new entries, including those for the phrase ‘to miss the point’ (which required the commissioning of library research to see if my first quotation, found in the third edition of Kennet's translation of Pascal's Thoughts on Religion, will convert to an earlier edition) and for Pogs — a children's game played with plastic discs, named after the lids of a Hawaiian juice drink of passion-fruit, orange, and guava.
Philip Gerrish, Assistant Editor (Bibliography)
Spent the whole day preparing batches of quotations to be sent out for checking by library researchers. This involved: using search tool to find quotations marked by editors as needing queries answered, gathering all examples from each individual work that I could find, deciding how many of these to send out at one time (I'm limited to roughly 70 quotations at one go), and then printing them off on paper. Then searched online library catalogues and our in-house bibliographical sources to provide guidance on how the quotations should be cited (date, author, form of title, form of location). Finally, updated annotations in individual entries and in-house records to show that work had been considered and dealt with.
Edmund Weiner, Deputy Chief Editor
I read and took notes from an article in a scholarly journal analysing the historical development of the epistemic use of ought (as in ‘it's 7 o'clock; I should think they all ought to have reached home by now’) from its more usual and older deontic use (‘one ought always to tell the truth’). This use is not in OED2 but is likely to be in OED3.
Jeremy Marshall, Associate Editor
I checked the French text of Cuvier's Le Règne Animal (1817) against Dr H. McMurtrie's English translation (1834), to confirm that the name ‘Palpicornes’, as used for a family of beetles, could be either French or scientific Latin, depending on context.
Sarah Ogilvie, Senior Assistant Editor
Yesterday, besides editing the usual batch of words with a non-European origin, which included the Hindi word pahari and the West African sense of palaver, I prepared a lecture for some visiting journalists from China. The lecture will compare Chinese words edited by James Murray (for the First Edition of OED) with Chinese words edited by us (for OED3). So Bev Hunt, the OED's archivist, kindly found Murray's slips for the words oopack, ketchup, cha, and chop-stick. In the crumbling slips for the last of these, we discovered a letter from the world-famous sinologist James Legge (1815-1897), Professor of Chinese at Oxford, relating the word chop-stick to Chinese k'wai tsze meaning ‘nimble boys’. He wrote, ‘If you saw how nimbly they are used, you would call the name a good one.’ I later learned that Professor Legge was a good friend of Murray, who requested to be buried beside him in Wolvercote Cemetery in north Oxford. Little did I know that the word chop-stick would lead me there.
Yvonne Warburton, Online Publication Manager
Mail some online links to a regular correspondent keen to establish an etymological link between god and good and goddess — try to gently educate her in the ins and outs of Germanic etymologies. Turn to the serious business of the day — access control, the dark arts by which users are authorized to get into OED Online. Our new OUP central system is still learning to talk to that of our hosts, HighWire Press in California, and various aspects of accounts and statistics need checking. Unearth some bogus requests for free trials of OED Online from individual users posing as institutions — no chance of success! Check the technical support e-mail; complaints from one displeased user who wants a thesaurus are offset by my god/good lady replying with thanks and ‘Goddess bless the OED!!’ Not a bad day.
Jemma Best, Senior Assistant Editor
I final-edited some entries with some help from a senior editor. One entry was for peg-legger (a noun meaning a person who has an artificial leg); I already had quotations from 1915, 1937, 1943, and 1995, mostly from British and American newspapers, but we followed a hint on the Internet and managed to find what appears to be a quotation from a book published in 1982, which allowed me to give a better picture of the range of texts in which this word has been used.
Teresa Armstrong, Subscriptions Manager, Online Sales and Marketing
A small proportion of my work is OED-related. I checked the files which are passed from the SAMS access control system to the HighWire access control system. I updated a number of access control records, most memorably for the Pentecostal Church of Vopnafjordur in Iceland. And I investigated the implications of Australian universities using Metalib on a shared portal for accessing/searching OED and other online resources.
Fiona McPherson, Senior Editor (New Words)
I spent some time training Jessica Stevens, who is with us on a placement, in the ways of the New Words Group. I went through some of the procedures that we follow when assessing a word which is not yet in OED, showing some of the databases we search to find evidence for it and generally explaining how we decide whether a word merits inclusion or not. Training like this is particularly enjoyable, as it forces you to focus your mind on the position in hand, and you are forced to explain procedures which are now second nature to someone who has never done anything like it before. It also makes you realize that you do actually know rather a lot about your position (something which you can often forget).
Elizabeth Thompson, Data Capture Assistant
I spent most of Monday searching newspaper databases (including the Times Digital Archive and the American source Newspaper Archive) for additional evidence for compounds of the noun pool. Compounds such as pool betting and pool hall led to articles about gambling in early twentieth-century America; pool petrol and pool butter revealed shortages in wartime Britain; and pool reporter and pool policy were relevant to the restricted access of newspaper reporters to the events surrounding the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War.
Gillian Walker, Editorial Project Manager
Today I sent out the end-of-year accounts reports to the OED's Principal Editors, showing expenditure against budget for 2003/04.
Bess Bradfield, Senior Assistant Editor
On Monday I edited my way through eighteen entries, from pinkishness to pinlock. En route I found six new antedatings, including a 1917 example of the verb pink-slip (meaning to fire someone, and previously only known from 1953); I also learned that it is better to be pinkish (fit, well) than a pinkling (a weak or delicate youth), that pink lady cocktails can be made with cream instead of egg white, and that in Australia drinking too many such alcoholic beverages may make one pinko.
Jane Millar, Project Planner
On Monday this week I checked the OED ‘Suggestions’ box, processed editors' timesheets relating to finalization work on publication batches 19 and 20 (orb to overzealousness) and spent two hours in a meeting discussing the new computer system with the technical team. The topic was ‘Schedule Management’, so we looked at screen mock-ups, discussed functionality, ergonomics, colour, navigation, etc., and focused on making the data useful and relevant both managerially and editorially.
David Martin, Senior Assistant Editor
Spent all day editing the entry for the word phoenix, which poses an interesting etymological question about a possible connection with Phoenician. During my trawl for new quotations I was perhaps lucky to add only one quotation about Harry Potter: his ‘phoenix-feathered wand’.
Jennie Price, Senior Editor (New Words)
Today saw the New Words Group begin work on a new range of the alphabet. I took a bundle of suggestions for new words — from the files, members of staff, and authors — and looked through them to discard any obvious non-starters: words already in, those with very little evidence, and so on. Then I started assessing each suggestion in more detail, searching databases (our own and external ones) to find sufficient evidence to create an entry. The first few did not make it through, but eventually I began a draft new entry for plough jockey, a mildly derogatory slang term for a farmer.
Abigail Reynolds, Artist in Residence
I spent the day testing magnifying glasses and lights to shine words onto walls... And cutting up copper piping.
John Simpson, Chief Editor
Working through the research file covering entries which have already been revised and published online. Some of the cards indicate minor stylistic changes that need to be made to the Dictionary. More interestingly others represent earlier examples to be added to entries. Perhaps the most surprising is an antedating for mallemaroking, defined as ‘the boisterous and drunken exchange of hospitality between sailors in extreme northern waters’. To date our only evidence for this comes from dictionaries and from people citing it as a curious expression for a curious activity. But now we have an example (collected by our Historical Reading Programme) from the famous whaler William Scoresby, using the term in context about fifty years before our previous first example. One for the history books. Another small pebble added to the mosaic of the OED.
Historical postscript: The randomly chosen date of 19 April turns out to have been an auspicious one. It was 122 years earlier to the day, on 19 April 1882, that James Murray passed the first batch of copy for the Dictionary to the printer; and on 19 April 1928 the publication of the First Edition was completed with the appearance of the final fascicle, Wyse-Wyzen.
19 April 2004: a day in the life of the OED
Bernadette Paton, Associate Editor
On Monday I edited OED entries for words beginning with pha-. I found out all there is to know about Greek phalanxes (a soldier in a phalanx, known as a phalangite, was allowed to occupy no more than 1.5 feet of space when marching — sounds a tight squeeze but they say ancient Greeks were quite small). I also learned about phalaricas (or phalaricae) — ancient Molotov cocktails consisting of a javelin wrapped in tow and pitch, set alight and hurled at the enemy. But my word of the day was phalanstery. Phalansteries were early nineteenth-century communes established by the French socialist Charles Fourier and run entirely on egalitarian principles. Sadly, they met the fate of most such enterprises, and I've labelled the word ‘Now hist.’ (i.e. it's still used, but only in a historical context).
Veronica Hurst, Principal Editor (Bibliography)
I worked through some of the flurry of contributions helping us to identify the remaining incompletely cited quotations taken by OED from Johnson's Dictionary (see my article in the March issue of OED News, which I hope may have been the starting point for some of these contributions). All in all we have been able to tick off another thirty or so of these ‘Johnson quotations’. Processing a contribution would typically involve: checking full titles and dates of the reported source texts in catalogues to arrive at the correct citation style for OED; calling up the relevant headword in OED; adding the bibliographical details supplied by the readers to the hitherto unidentified Johnson quotations; notifying Fred Nicholls of the Johnson Project in case they're quotations he hasn't yet been able to identify; and arranging for the necessary changes to be made to the list of Johnson quotations as it appears on our web site, ‘greying out’ those quotations that have now been identified and adding the name of the reader as the discoverer thereof. [Editor's note: as of the time of writing, further contributions have increased the number of newly-identified Johnson quotations to 67, leaving only 229 still to be found. Thank you to all our readers!]
Samantha Schad, Senior Assistant Editor (Etymology)
On Monday I did penance. Actually, I revised the Latin component of the etymology of the word penance. This also involved looking at the entry for penitence; Latin paenitentia is the ultimate source of both words.
Katherine Martin, Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)
I was working on a draft entry for the verb other (and the related adjective othered). Due to the complex and philosophical nature of these terms (and our mutual interest in the subject matter), Abigail and I decided to split them up — she took on the noun othering — so that we could discuss the definitions in detail and share our research.
Abigail Zitin, Senior Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)
Apart from othering (see above), I have been preoccupied with participles. Assigned the simple task of putting together a definition and quotation paragraph for the literal sense of the adjectival compound ‘oiled-up’ — which one would expect to appear in print well before the more fanciful metaphorical extensions of the term — I've hit upon a possible first quotation from Dickens' Hard Times: ‘All the melancholy-mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day's monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.’ But is this, on second thought, more verb than adjective, with its implied ‘elephants [that had been]...oiled up’? It would be a shame not to be able to use the quotation: it would make a fine counterbalance to the ‘oiled-up love god’ who features in the last quotation in my draft entry, from a 2002 issue of Smash Hits magazine.
Andreas Groeger, Assistant Editor (Etymology)
I spent a very interesting time investigating the etymology of the noun panzer, eagerly searching for early uses of the word in its ‘tank’ sense in German. The earliest German occurrence I've found so far is from 1934, but this can probably be improved upon!
Catherine Bailey, Senior Assistant Editor
On Monday I arrived to a diary full of meetings concerning a new editing system for the OED, the development of which is involving a great deal of input from the staff of the project. It was quite an atypical OED day; I spent all day talking about the processes of editing, finding quotations, and tracking workflow, and no time at all actually doing those things.
Andrew Ball, Senior Editor
I tried to ascertain whether all of the quotations in OED2 cited in the form ‘a1500 P. Johnston Thre Deid Powis’, which appear to have been taken from the version of this old Scots poem given in a folio manuscript known as the ‘Maitland Folio’, could be quoted instead from the ‘Bannatyne manuscript’, and attributed to Robert Henryson. They could.
Bill Trumble, Associate Editor
Science revision for the word pen-fish: three sketchy senses in OED (‘sea-pen’; ‘squid’; ‘porgy’); no twentieth-century quotations. So I searched ECCO [Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a valuable electronic resource] for earlier examples, and found some, but only for a fourth sense (an eelpout). Other online resources yielded examples only for the sense ‘fish raised in a pen’, another entry altogether if I decide to add it. A bitty entry made bittier. (Typical fish.)
Nick Shearing, Senior Editor (New Words)
The Contemporary Reading Programme regularly looks at recent issues of magazines, and today I prepared some of the magazines that have recently been read (and noteworthy words highlighted) for keying. This entailed giving suitable OED citation styles for such titles as Sporting Gun, Diva, Prediction, Knowledge.co.uk Magazine, Scouting Magazine, Mixmag, and Loaded, and attaching appropriate subject labelling to these sources and their related catchwords. I also edited a number of new entries, including those for the phrase ‘to miss the point’ (which required the commissioning of library research to see if my first quotation, found in the third edition of Kennet's translation of Pascal's Thoughts on Religion, will convert to an earlier edition) and for Pogs — a children's game played with plastic discs, named after the lids of a Hawaiian juice drink of passion-fruit, orange, and guava.
Philip Gerrish, Assistant Editor (Bibliography)
Spent the whole day preparing batches of quotations to be sent out for checking by library researchers. This involved: using search tool to find quotations marked by editors as needing queries answered, gathering all examples from each individual work that I could find, deciding how many of these to send out at one time (I'm limited to roughly 70 quotations at one go), and then printing them off on paper. Then searched online library catalogues and our in-house bibliographical sources to provide guidance on how the quotations should be cited (date, author, form of title, form of location). Finally, updated annotations in individual entries and in-house records to show that work had been considered and dealt with.
Edmund Weiner, Deputy Chief Editor
I read and took notes from an article in a scholarly journal analysing the historical development of the epistemic use of ought (as in ‘it's 7 o'clock; I should think they all ought to have reached home by now’) from its more usual and older deontic use (‘one ought always to tell the truth’). This use is not in OED2 but is likely to be in OED3.
Jeremy Marshall, Associate Editor
I checked the French text of Cuvier's Le Règne Animal (1817) against Dr H. McMurtrie's English translation (1834), to confirm that the name ‘Palpicornes’, as used for a family of beetles, could be either French or scientific Latin, depending on context.
Sarah Ogilvie, Senior Assistant Editor
Yesterday, besides editing the usual batch of words with a non-European origin, which included the Hindi word pahari and the West African sense of palaver, I prepared a lecture for some visiting journalists from China. The lecture will compare Chinese words edited by James Murray (for the First Edition of OED) with Chinese words edited by us (for OED3). So Bev Hunt, the OED's archivist, kindly found Murray's slips for the words oopack, ketchup, cha, and chop-stick. In the crumbling slips for the last of these, we discovered a letter from the world-famous sinologist James Legge (1815-1897), Professor of Chinese at Oxford, relating the word chop-stick to Chinese k'wai tsze meaning ‘nimble boys’. He wrote, ‘If you saw how nimbly they are used, you would call the name a good one.’ I later learned that Professor Legge was a good friend of Murray, who requested to be buried beside him in Wolvercote Cemetery in north Oxford. Little did I know that the word chop-stick would lead me there.
Yvonne Warburton, Online Publication Manager
Mail some online links to a regular correspondent keen to establish an etymological link between god and good and goddess — try to gently educate her in the ins and outs of Germanic etymologies. Turn to the serious business of the day — access control, the dark arts by which users are authorized to get into OED Online. Our new OUP central system is still learning to talk to that of our hosts, HighWire Press in California, and various aspects of accounts and statistics need checking. Unearth some bogus requests for free trials of OED Online from individual users posing as institutions — no chance of success! Check the technical support e-mail; complaints from one displeased user who wants a thesaurus are offset by my god/good lady replying with thanks and ‘Goddess bless the OED!!’ Not a bad day.
Jemma Best, Senior Assistant Editor
I final-edited some entries with some help from a senior editor. One entry was for peg-legger (a noun meaning a person who has an artificial leg); I already had quotations from 1915, 1937, 1943, and 1995, mostly from British and American newspapers, but we followed a hint on the Internet and managed to find what appears to be a quotation from a book published in 1982, which allowed me to give a better picture of the range of texts in which this word has been used.
Teresa Armstrong, Subscriptions Manager, Online Sales and Marketing
A small proportion of my work is OED-related. I checked the files which are passed from the SAMS access control system to the HighWire access control system. I updated a number of access control records, most memorably for the Pentecostal Church of Vopnafjordur in Iceland. And I investigated the implications of Australian universities using Metalib on a shared portal for accessing/searching OED and other online resources.
Fiona McPherson, Senior Editor (New Words)
I spent some time training Jessica Stevens, who is with us on a placement, in the ways of the New Words Group. I went through some of the procedures that we follow when assessing a word which is not yet in OED, showing some of the databases we search to find evidence for it and generally explaining how we decide whether a word merits inclusion or not. Training like this is particularly enjoyable, as it forces you to focus your mind on the position in hand, and you are forced to explain procedures which are now second nature to someone who has never done anything like it before. It also makes you realize that you do actually know rather a lot about your position (something which you can often forget).
Elizabeth Thompson, Data Capture Assistant
I spent most of Monday searching newspaper databases (including the Times Digital Archive and the American source Newspaper Archive) for additional evidence for compounds of the noun pool. Compounds such as pool betting and pool hall led to articles about gambling in early twentieth-century America; pool petrol and pool butter revealed shortages in wartime Britain; and pool reporter and pool policy were relevant to the restricted access of newspaper reporters to the events surrounding the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War.
Gillian Walker, Editorial Project Manager
Today I sent out the end-of-year accounts reports to the OED's Principal Editors, showing expenditure against budget for 2003/04.
Bess Bradfield, Senior Assistant Editor
On Monday I edited my way through eighteen entries, from pinkishness to pinlock. En route I found six new antedatings, including a 1917 example of the verb pink-slip (meaning to fire someone, and previously only known from 1953); I also learned that it is better to be pinkish (fit, well) than a pinkling (a weak or delicate youth), that pink lady cocktails can be made with cream instead of egg white, and that in Australia drinking too many such alcoholic beverages may make one pinko.
Jane Millar, Project Planner
On Monday this week I checked the OED ‘Suggestions’ box, processed editors' timesheets relating to finalization work on publication batches 19 and 20 (orb to overzealousness) and spent two hours in a meeting discussing the new computer system with the technical team. The topic was ‘Schedule Management’, so we looked at screen mock-ups, discussed functionality, ergonomics, colour, navigation, etc., and focused on making the data useful and relevant both managerially and editorially.
David Martin, Senior Assistant Editor
Spent all day editing the entry for the word phoenix, which poses an interesting etymological question about a possible connection with Phoenician. During my trawl for new quotations I was perhaps lucky to add only one quotation about Harry Potter: his ‘phoenix-feathered wand’.
Jennie Price, Senior Editor (New Words)
Today saw the New Words Group begin work on a new range of the alphabet. I took a bundle of suggestions for new words — from the files, members of staff, and authors — and looked through them to discard any obvious non-starters: words already in, those with very little evidence, and so on. Then I started assessing each suggestion in more detail, searching databases (our own and external ones) to find sufficient evidence to create an entry. The first few did not make it through, but eventually I began a draft new entry for plough jockey, a mildly derogatory slang term for a farmer.
Abigail Reynolds, Artist in Residence
I spent the day testing magnifying glasses and lights to shine words onto walls... And cutting up copper piping.
John Simpson, Chief Editor
Working through the research file covering entries which have already been revised and published online. Some of the cards indicate minor stylistic changes that need to be made to the Dictionary. More interestingly others represent earlier examples to be added to entries. Perhaps the most surprising is an antedating for mallemaroking, defined as ‘the boisterous and drunken exchange of hospitality between sailors in extreme northern waters’. To date our only evidence for this comes from dictionaries and from people citing it as a curious expression for a curious activity. But now we have an example (collected by our Historical Reading Programme) from the famous whaler William Scoresby, using the term in context about fifty years before our previous first example. One for the history books. Another small pebble added to the mosaic of the OED.
Historical postscript: The randomly chosen date of 19 April turns out to have been an auspicious one. It was 122 years earlier to the day, on 19 April 1882, that James Murray passed the first batch of copy for the Dictionary to the printer; and on 19 April 1928 the publication of the First Edition was completed with the appearance of the final fascicle, Wyse-Wyzen.
