James Murray (lexicographer) - Murray and The OED

Murray and The OED

On 26 April 1878, Murray was invited to Oxford to meet the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, with a view to his taking on the job of editor of a new dictionary of the English language, to replace Johnson’s and to capture all the words then extant in the English speaking world in all their various shades of meaning. It would be a massive project, which required somebody with Murray’s knowledge and single-minded determination.

On 1 March 1879, a formal agreement was put in place to the effect that Murray was to edit a new English Dictionary. It was expected to take ten years to complete and be some 7,000 pages long, in four volumes. In fact, when the final results were published in 1928, it ran to twelve volumes, with 414,825 words defined and 1,827,306 citations employed to illustrate their meanings.

In preparation for the work ahead, Murray built a corrugated-iron shed in the grounds of Mill Hill School, called the Scriptorium, to house his small team of assistants as well as the flood of slips (bearing quotations illustrating the use of words to be defined in the dictionary) which started to flow in as a result of his appeal. As work continued on the early part of the dictionary, Murray gave up his job as a teacher and became a full time lexicographer.

In the summer of 1884, Murray and his family moved to a large house on the Banbury Road in north Oxford. Murray had a second Scriptorium built in its back garden, a larger building than the first, with more storage space for the ever-increasing number of slips being sent to Murray and his team. Anything addressed to ‘Mr Murray, Oxford’ would always find its way to him, and such was the volume of post sent by Murray and his team that the Post Office erected a special post box outside Murray’s house.

Murray continued his work on the dictionary, age and failing health doing nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for the work he had devoted much of his life to. He died of pleurisy on 26 July 1915 and was buried in Oxford.