THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH (Part 7)

After a short break, here is chapter 7 of "The History of English", "The Age of dictionary". Watch the video and read the transcript. Try to understand as much as possible and look up any difficult words.

With English expanding in all directions, along came a new breed of men called lexicographers who wanted to put an end to this anarchy. A word they defined as what happens when people spell words slightly differently from each other?

One of the greatest was Dr Johnson, whose Dictionary of the English Language took him nine years to write. It was eighteen inches tall and contained 42,773 entries, meaning that even if you couldn't read it was still pretty useful if you wanted to reach a high shelf.

For the first time when people were calling you a pickleherring, a jobbernow or a fopdoodle you could understand exactly what they meant and you'd have the consolation of knowing they were all using the standard spelling.

Try as he might to stop them, words kept being invented and in 1857 a new book was started that would become the Oxford English Dictionary. It took another seventy years to be finished after the first editor resigned to be an archbishop. The second died of TB and the third was so boring that half his volunteers quit and one of them ended up in an asylum. It eventually appeared in 1928 and has continued to be revised ever since, proving the whole idea that you can stop people making up words is complete ‘snuffbumble’