Hall and The Oxford English Dictionary
In 1869 Hall was dismissed by the India Office, which unjustly accused him of being a drunk and a foreign spy, and expelled from the Philological Society.
He then moved to Suffolk where, while leading the life of a recluse, he published more philological work. W. W. Skeat, an early supporter of the OED idea, persuaded him to collaborate as a reader for the project. With another US citizen, Dr.William Chester Minor, he would become one of the most important (and most obsessive) collaborators the OED Project’s director Sir James Murray (1837–1915) had, and is recognized as such in many of the prefaces to the Dictionary itself. His task was to read certain books looking for examples of the use of particular words, and then to send the relevant quotations to Murray’s staff.
According to scholar Elizabeth Knowles, who studied the Murray-Hall correspondence in the OED archives, Hall spent 'four hours a day...on proofs' and that 'for much of the rest of the time, he was reading for vocabulary'. Once he supplied more than 200 examples of the use of the word “hand” and had to be told that there was no space for so many.
Murray himself would say that “Time would fail to tell of the splendid assistance rendered to the Dictionary by Dr. Fitzedward Hall, who devotes nearly his whole day to reading the proofs...and to supplementing, correcting, and increasing the quotations taken from his own exhaustless stores. When the Dictionary is finished, no man will have contributed to its illustrative wealth so much as Fitzedward Hall. Those who know his books know the enormous wealth of quotation which he brings to bear upon every point of English literary usage; but my admiration is if possible increased when I see how he can cap and put the cope-stone on the collections of our 1500 readers.“
Hall was best at supplementing existing quotation collections for particular words. After his death, Murray corresponded with Hall’s son to try to find and reference the supplies of quotations his father had noted but not submitted, with unclear results.
Fitzedward Hall died at Marlesford, Suffolk, on 1 February 1901.
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