The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all,” he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures. Weight and measure were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than English, precisely because it was less worn by everyday use, but the Romans had not possessed the necessary words either. Newton’s raw notes reveal a struggle hidden in the finished product. He tried expressions like quantitas materiae. Too hard for Cawdrey: “materiall, of some matter, or importance.” Newton suggested (to himself) “that which arises from its density and bulk conjointly.” He considered more words: “This quantity I designate under the name of body or mass.” Without the right words he could not proceed. Velocity, force, gravity—none of these were yet suitable. They could not be defined in terms of one another; there was nothing in visible nature at which anyone could point a finger; and there was no book in which to look them up.

As for Robert Cawdrey, his mark on history ends with the publication of his Table Alphabeticall in 1604. No one knows when he died. No one knows how many copies the printer made. There are no records (“records, writings layde up for remembrance”). A single copy made its way to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which has preserved it. All the others disappeared. A second edition appeared in 1609, slightly expanded (“much inlarged,” the title page claims falsely) by Cawdrey’s son, Thomas, and a third and fourth appeared in 1613 and 1617, and there the life of this book ended.

It was overshadowed by a new dictionary, twice as comprehensive, An English Expositour: Teaching the Interpretation of the hardest Words used in our Language, with sundry Explications, Descriptions, and Discourses. Its compiler, John Bullokar, otherwise left as faint a mark on the historical record as Cawdrey did. He was doctor of physic; he lived for some time in Chichester; his dates of birth and death are uncertain; he is said to have visited London in 1611 and there to have seen a dead crocodile; and little else is known. His Expositour appeared in 1616 and went through several editions in the succeeding decades. Then in 1656 a London barrister, Thomas Blount, published his Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue. Blount’s dictionary listed more than eleven thousand words, many of which, he recognized, were new, reaching London in the hurly-burly of trade and commerce—

coffa or cauphe, a kind of drink among the Turks and Persians, (and of late introduced among us) which is black, thick and bitter, destrained from Berries of that nature, and name, thought good and very wholesom: they say it expels melancholy.

—or home-grown, such as “tom-boy, a girle or wench that leaps up and down like a boy.” He seems to have known he was aiming at a moving target. The dictionary maker’s “labor,” he wrote in his preface, “would find no end, since our English tongue daily changes habit.” Blount’s definitions were much more elaborate than Cawdrey’s, and he tried to provide information about the origins of words as well.

Neither Bullokar nor Blount so much as mentioned Cawdrey. He was already forgotten. But in 1933, upon the publication of the greatest word book of all, the first editors of the Oxford English Dictionary did pay their respects to his “slim, small volume.” They called it “the original acorn” from which their oak had grown. (Cawdrey: “akecorne, k fruit.”)

Four hundred and two years after the Table Alphabeticall, the International Astronomical Union voted to declare Pluto a nonplanet, and John Simpson had to make a quick decision. He and his band of lexicographers in Oxford were working on the P’s. Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot, and polyamorous were among the new words entering the OED. The entry for Pluto was itself relatively new. The planet had been discovered only in 1930, too late for the OED’s first edition. The name Minerva was first proposed and then rejected because there was already an asteroid Minerva. In terms of names, the heavens were beginning to fill up. Then “Pluto” was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old resident of Oxford. The OED caught up by adding an entry for Pluto in its second edition: “1. A small planet of the solar system lying beyond the orbit of Neptune . . . 2. The name of a cartoon dog that made its first appearance in Walt Disney’s Moose Hunt, released in April 1931.”

“We really don’t like being pushed into megachanges,” Simpson said, but he had little choice. The Disney meaning of Pluto had proved more stable than the astronomical sense, which was downgraded to “small planetary body.” Consequences rippled through the OED. Pluto was removed from the list under planet n. 3a. Plutonian was revised (not to be confused with pluton, plutey, or plutonyl ).

Simpson was the sixth in a distinguished line, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose names rolled fluently off his tongue— “Murray, Bradley, Craigie, Onions, Burchfield, so however many fingers that is”—and saw himself as a steward of their traditions, as well as traditions of English lexicography extending back to Cawdrey by way of Samuel Johnson. James Murray in the nineteenth century established a working method based on index cards, slips of paper 6 inches by 4 inches. At any given moment a thousand such slips sat on Simpson’s desk, and within a stone’s throw were millions more, filling metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries. But the word-slips had gone obsolete. They had become treeware. Treeware had just entered the OED as “computing slang, freq. humorous”; blog was recognized in 2003, dot-commer in 2004, cyberpet in 2005, and the verb to Google in 2006. Simpson himself Googled often. Beside the word-slips his desk held conduits into the nervous system of the language: instantaneous connection to a worldwide network of proxy amateur lexicographers and access to a vast, interlocking set of databases growing asymptotically toward the ideal of All Previous Text. The dictionary had met cyberspace, and neither would be the same thereafter. However much Simpson loved the OED’s roots and legacy, he was leading a revolution, willy-nilly—in what it was, what it knew, what it saw. Where Cawdrey had been isolated, Simpson was connected.

The English language, spoken now by more than a billion people globally, has entered a period of ferment, and the perspective available in these venerable Oxford offices is both intimate and sweeping. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop has become wild and amorphous: a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech; newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; television and radio broadcasts and phonograph records. By contrast, the dictionary itself has acquired the status of a monument, definitive and towering. It exerts an influence on the language it tries to observe. It wears its authoritative role reluctantly. The lexicographers may recall Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic century-old definition: “dictionary, a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.” Nowadays they stress that they do not presume (or deign) to disapprove any particular usage or spelling. But they cannot disavow a strong ambition: the goal of completeness. They want every word, all the lingo: idioms and euphemisms, sacred or profane, dead or alive, the King’s English or the street’s. It is an ideal only: the constraints of space and time are ever present and, at the margins, the question of what qualifies as a word can become impossible to answer. Still, to the extent possible, the OED is meant to be a perfect record, perfect mirror of the language.

The dictionary ratifies the persistence of the word. It declares that the meanings of words come from other words. It implies that all words, taken together, form an interlocking structure: interlocking, because all words are defined in terms of other words. This could never have been an issue in an oral culture, where language was barely visible. Only when printing—and the dictionary—put the language into separate relief, as an object to be scrutinized, could anyone develop a sense of word meaning as interdependent and even circular. Words had to be considered as words, representing other words, apart from things. In the twentieth century, when the technologies of logic advanced to high levels, the potential for circularity became a problem. “In giving explanations I already have to use language full blown,” complained Ludwig Wittgenstein. He echoed Newton’s frustration three centuries earlier, but with an extra twist, because where Newton wanted words for nature’s laws, Wittgenstein wanted words for words: “When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and material for what we want to say?” Yes. And the language was always in flux.

James Murray was speaking of the language as well as the book when he said, in 1900, “The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself adown the ages.” The first edition of what became the OED was one of the largest books that had ever been made: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 414,825 words in ten weighty volumes, presented to King George V and President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The work had taken decades; Murray himself was dead; and the dictionary was understood to be out of date even as the volumes were bound and sewn. Several supplements followed, but not till 1989 did the second edition appear: twenty volumes, totaling 22,000 pages. It weighed 138 pounds. The third edition is different. It is weightless, taking its shape in the digital realm. It may never again involve paper and ink. Beginning in the year 2000, a revision of the entire contents began to appear online in quarterly installments, each comprising several thousand revised entries and hundreds of new words.

Cawdrey had begun work naturally enough with the letter A, and so had James Murray in 1879, but Simpson chose to begin with M. He was wary of the A’s. To insiders it had long been clear that the OED as printed was not a seamless masterpiece. The early letters still bore scars of the immaturity of the uncertain work in Murray’s first days. “Basically he got here, sorted his suitcases out and started setting up text,” Simpson said. “It just took them a long time to sort out their policy and things, so if we started at A, then we’d be making our job doubly difficult. I think they’d sorted themselves out by . . . well, I was going to say D, but Murray always said that E was the worst letter, because his assistant, Henry Bradley, started E, and Murray always said that he did that rather badly. So then we thought, maybe it’s safe to start with G, H. But you get to G and H and there’s I, J, K, and you know, you think, well, start after that.”

The first thousand entries from M to mahurat went online in the spring of 2000. A year later, the lexicographers reached words starting with me: me-ism (a creed for modern times), meds (colloq. for drugs), medspeak (doctors’ jargon), meet-and-greet (a N. Amer. type of social occasion), and an assortment of combined forms under media (baron, circus, darling, hype, savvy) and mega- (pixel, bitch, dose, hit, trend). This was no longer a language spoken by 5 million mostly illiterate inhabitants of a small island. As the OED revised the entries letter by letter, it also began adding neologisms wherever they arose; waiting for the alphabetical sequence became impractical. Thus one installment in 2001 saw the arrival of acid jazz, Bollywood, channel surfing, double-click, emoticon, feel-good, gangsta, hyperlink, and many more. Kool-Aid was recognized as a new word, not because the OED feels obliged to list proprietary names (the original Kool-Ade powdered drink had been patented in the United States in 1927) but because a special usage could no longer be ignored: “to drink the Kool-Aid: to demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty.” The growth of this peculiar expression since the use of a powdered beverage in a mass poisoning in Guyana in 1978 bespoke a certain density of global communication.

But they were no slaves to fashion, these Oxford lexicographers. As a rule a neologism needs five years of solid evidence for admission to the canon. Every proposed word undergoes intense scrutiny. The approval of a new word is a solemn matter. It must be in general use, beyond any particular place of origin; the OED is global, recognizing words from everywhere English is spoken, but it does not want to capture local quirks. Once added, a word cannot come out. A word can go obsolete or rare, but the most ancient and forgotten words have a way of reappearing—rediscovered or spontaneously reinvented—and in any case they are part of the language’s history. All 2,500 of Cawdrey’s words are in the OED, perforce. For thirty-one of them Cawdrey’s little book was the first known usage. For a few Cawdrey is all alone. This is troublesome. The OED is irrevocably committed. Cawdrey, for example, has “onust, loaden, overcharged”; so the OED has “loaded, burdened,” but it is an outlier, a one-off. Did Cawdrey make it up? “I’m tending towards the view that he was attempting to reproduce vocabulary he had heard or seen,” Simpson said. “But I can’t be absolutely sure.” Cawdrey has “hallucinate, to deceive, or blind”; the OED duly gave “to deceive” as the first sense of the word, though it never found anyone else who used it that way. In cases like these, the editors can add their double caveat “Obs. rare.” But there it is.

For the twenty-first-century OED a single source is never enough. Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constituency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the OED. Nonce-word, in fact, was coined by James Murray himself. He got it in. An American psychologist, Sondra Smalley, coined the word codependency in 1979 and began lobbying for it in the eighties; the editors finally drafted an entry in the nineties, when they judged the word to have become established. W. H. Auden declared that he wanted to be recognized as an OED word coiner—and he was, at long last, for motted, metalogue, spitzy, and others. The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self-consciousness in the language’s users and creators. Anthony Burgess whinged in print about his inability to break through: “I invented some years ago the word amation, for the art or act of making love, and still think it useful. But I have to persuade others to use it in print before it is eligible for lexicographicizing (if that word exists)”—he knew it did not. “T. S. Eliot’s large authority got the shameful (in my view) juvescence into the previous volume of the Supplement.” Burgess was quite sure that Eliot simply misspelled juvenescence. If so, the misspelling was either copied or reprised twenty-eight years later by Stephen Spender, so juvescence has two citations, not one. The OED admits that it is rare.

As hard as the OED tries to embody the language’s fluidity, it cannot help but serve as an agent of its crystallization. The problem of spelling poses characteristic difficulties. “Every form in which a word has occurred throughout its history” is meant to be included. So for mackerel (“a well-known sea-fish, Scomber scombrus, much used for food”) the second edition in 1989 listed nineteen alternative spellings. The unearthing of sources never ends, though, so the third edition revised entry in 2002 listed no fewer than thirty: maccarel, mackaral, mackarel, mackarell, mackerell, mackeril, mackreel, mackrel, mackrell, mackril, macquerel, macquerell, macrel, macrell, macrelle, macril, macrill, makarell, makcaral, makerel, makerell, makerelle, makral, makrall, makreill, makrel, makrell, makyrelle, maquerel, and maycril. As lexicographers, the editors would never declare these alternatives to be wrong: misspellings. They do not wish to declare their choice of spelling for the headword, mackerel, to be “correct.” They emphasize that they examine the evidence and choose “the most common current spelling.” Even so, arbitrary considerations come into play: “Oxford’s house style occasionally takes precedence, as with verbs which can end -ize or -ise, where the -ize spelling is always used.” They know that no matter how often and how firmly they disclaim a prescriptive authority, a reader will turn to the dictionary to find out how a word should be spelled. They cannot escape inconsistencies. They feel obliged to include words that make purists wince. A new entry as of December 2003 memorialized nucular: “= nuclear a. (in various senses).” Yet they refuse to count evident misprints found by way of Internet searches. They do not recognize straight-laced, even though statistical evidence finds that bastardized form outnumbering strait-laced. For the crystallization of spelling, the OED offers a conventional explanation: “Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance.” This is true. But it omits the role of the dictionary itself, arbitrator and exemplar.

For Cawdrey the dictionary was a snapshot; he could not see past his moment in time. Samuel Johnson was more explicitly aware of the dictionary’s historical dimension. He justified his ambitious program in part as a means of bringing a wild thing under control—the wild thing being the language, “which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance; resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion; and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.” Not until the OED, though, did lexicography attempt to reveal the whole shape of a language across time. The OED becomes a historical panorama. The project gains poignancy if the electronic age is seen as a new age of orality, the word breaking free from the bonds of cold print. No publishing institution better embodies those bonds, but the OED, too, tries to throw them off. The editors feel they can no longer wait for a new word to appear in print, let alone in a respectably bound book, before they must take note. For tighty-whities (men’s underwear), new in 2007, they cite a typescript of North Carolina campus slang. For kitesurfer, they cite a posting to the Usenet newsgroup alt.kite and later a New Zealand newspaper found via an online database. Bits in the ether.

When Murray began work on the new dictionary, the idea was to find the words, and with them the signposts to their history. No one had any idea how many words were there to be found. By then the best and most comprehensive dictionary of English was American: Noah Webster’s, seventy thousand words. That was a baseline. Where were the rest to be discovered? For the first editors of what became the OED, it went almost without saying that the source, the wellspring, should be the literature of the language—particularly the books of distinction and quality. The dictionary’s first readers combed Milton and Shakespeare (still the single most quoted author, with more than thirty thousand references), Fielding and Swift, histories and sermons, philosophers and poets. Murray announced in a famous public appeal in 1879:

A thousand readers are wanted. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory.

He considered the territory to be large but bounded. The founders of the dictionary explicitly meant to find every word, however many that would ultimately be. They planned a complete inventory. Why should they not? The number of books was unknown but not unlimited, and the number of words in those books was countable. The task seemed formidable but finite.

It no longer seems finite. Lexicographers are accepting the language’s boundlessness. They know by heart Murray’s famous remark: “The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernable circumference.” In the center are the words everyone knows. At the edges, where Murray placed slang and cant and scientific jargon and foreign border crossers, everyone’s sense of the language differs and no one’s can be called “standard.”

Murray called the center “well defined,” but infinitude and fuzziness can be seen there. The easiest, most common words—the words Cawdrey had no thought of including—require, in the OED, the most extensive entries. The entry for make alone would fill a book: it teases apart ninety-eight distinct senses of the verb, and some of these senses have a dozen or more subsenses. Samuel Johnson saw the problem with these words and settled on a solution: he threw up his hands.

My labor has likewise been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or interpret them by any words of distinct and settled meaning; such are bear, break, come, cast, full, get, give, do, put, set, go, run, make, take, turn, throw. If of these the whole power is not accurately delivered, it must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, these words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.

Johnson had a point. These are words that any speaker of English can press into new service at any time, on any occasion, alone or in combination, inventively or not, with hopes of being understood. In every revision, the OED’s entry for a word like make subdivides further and thus grows larger. The task is unbounded in an inward-facing direction.

The more obvious kind of unboundedness appears at the edges. Neologism never ceases. Words are coined by committee: transistor, Bell Laboratories, 1948. Or by wags: booboisie, H. L. Mencken, 1922. Most arise through spontaneous generation, organisms appearing in a petri dish, like blog (c. 1999). One batch of arrivals includes agroterrorism, bada-bing, bahookie (a body part), beer pong (a drinking game), bippy (as in, you bet your ———), chucklesome, cypherpunk, tuneage, and wonky. None are what Cawdrey would have seen as “hard, usual words,” and none are anywhere near Murray’s well-defined center, but they now belong to the common language. Even bada-bing: “Suggesting something happening suddenly, emphatically, or easily and predictably; ‘Just like that!’, ‘Presto!’ ” The historical citations begin with a 1965 audio recording of a comedy routine by Pat Cooper and continue with newspaper clippings, a television news transcript, and a line of dialogue from the first Godfather movie: “You’ve gotta get up close like this and bada-bing! you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” The lexicographers also provide an etymology, an exquisite piece of guesswork: “Origin uncertain. Perh. imitative of the sound of a drum roll and cymbal clash. Perh. cf. Italian bada bene mark well.”