The Meaning of Everything audiobook

I can't recommend this enough. Fascinating, humor-full and very readable. You wouldn't think this would be funny, but it is. I mean laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe I'm a complete nerd but this is fascinating and fun and full of things you don't need to know! The people who contributed to the dictionary are truly interesting. I loved hearing about word origins and how they fit into the dictionary -- I wish Winchester would write more on this topic. I've fallen in love with his writing style which sounds to me as though it's meant to be read aloud by a middle-aged British man. I've now onto his Map That Changed the World.

Simon Winchester has done it again. A clear concise study of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. I have already read one of his books, The Madman and the Professor, which describes one of the aspects of the project. This book followed that one and described the entire history instead of only one area. I listened to the audio narrated by the author, but also borrowed the book from the library. It is full of pictures of all the people who were involved, as well as an index of subjects and a list of further reading. If you thought that creating a dictionary of this magnitude was easy, sorry, you are incorrect. The book took 70+ years and three editors to complete. The first edition (started in 1854) was completed in 1928 and comprised 10 volumes and 10,000+ pages. This book primarily describes all the people involved in the creation of the dictionary and the methods used to gather the data. A very interesting book that taught me much. Any reader should invest time in reading this book. 4 stars

The only flaw I could spot in this delightful book was the author's bigotry against orthodox Christianity. For instance, James Murray, the most central figure of the creation of the OED, wore a black beret in the style of one of his personal heroes, John Knox, and Winchester couldn't let pass a mention of the great Scottish reformer without getting in a dig at Monstrous Regiment that proclaimed his ignorance of the book, its author, and women. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play very much, though this time it was about Our British Friend. I've never owned an OED, and though I might could dig up one of the two-volume jobbies at a reasonable price, I don't think my eyes could handle it even with the magnifying glass. The online subscription would be ideal, but I can't justify the $100 annual subscription. But I love it all the same...just knowing that it's out there in all its glory, the fruit of the decades-long labors of Murray and the mad Dr. Minor and the beloved Professor Tolkein (who famously wrote the entry for walrus...and contributed to the one for hobbit) among many others. I occasionally contribute a usage quote to Merriam-Webster's online edition, which is my very little way of following in their footsteps.OH!!! And how could I forget that I was cited in the OED!!!!!The author narrated the audiobook and was, in that role, perfect.

A quite lovely little dip into OED history. This is one of Winchester's more enjoyable books, probably because it's shorter and less long-winded. But I did find gaps in some of his historical descriptions of people and events surrounding the OED, and thought he could have fleshed out and organized things just a bit better. Still, quite a fun read and I'd recommend it.For books on the same topic, see The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary and Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary.

OED - The Oxford English Dictionary. The phrase conjures in me a picture of a massive book on a wooden library stand opened randomly to somewhere in the middle, with seemingly infinite lines of tiny text - the ultimate source of information about the meanings and derivations of words in English. In my lifetime, I've been able to take the existence of dictionaries for granted. Need a definition? Reach over to the shelf, answers available at my fingertips (and, of course, now even more literally through a networked keyboard). In The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester pulls back my "taken for granted" blinders with this story of the long history of the creation of the OED. Between an 1857 speech and the 1928 publication of the final piece of the first edition of the OED - 71 years! Winchester's story combines a straightforward history of the process with attention to the details of a variety of words and meanings. Who knew that "set" would be the most complex word to define in the English language. Who would have expected that the sense of success when the "A" volume was finally complete was nearly crushed when "B" turned out to be far more demanding. Do you know which letter begins the fewest words in English? ("V" - Was that your guess? It wouldn't have been mine). Assembly and publication exceeded the lifetimes of so many who contributed. Leadership always (greatly) underestimated the time remaining to final publication. Heroic commitments of many pulled the project through moments of near collapse. Bureaucrats fumed and fought, funders squeezed, Oxford long withheld its full support, a cast of thousands contributed to the assembly of "all" the words in the English language, senior editors each devoted decades to the collection and assembly of millions of word slips contributed by readers around the world. Thanks to Winchester for pulling together this interesting tale of the creation of a splendid resource. This is an entertaining and informative read for a quiet day, sitting in the sun or by a warm fire, a glass of wine nearby - enjoy!

This is exactly the kind of thing I love. You have a grand story of real human endeavor and achievement--the inception and construction of the first Oxford English Dictionary--filtered through the lens of the very human characters involved in its construction and the outrageously difficult, outlandishly remarkable (one man contributed enormous amounts from inside an insane asylum), and everything in between. You get huge doses of history (of language, of dictionaries, of England itself) and large smatterings of personal color (I had known that J.R.R. Tolkien himself helped with part of the W-words, but more of that story is here). All throughout, Winchester's great love of and erudition on the topic of the Oxford English Dictionary shines through like a beacon. I found this book to be remarkable in almost every way. I can recommend it to lovers of words and to those with more than a passing interest in language and the history of the methods by which human beings have been trapping it with the pages of books. Thoroughly engrossing.

Even as a child, because I was so, so cool, I wondered how dictionaries were made. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), then, crossed my mind only as something even more extreme, more impossible.So, I enjoyed this tale of how the OED was made. It took 70 years. As an editor who has toiled on the production, content, and publisher/acquisitions side of making books, this text stressed me out. A lot. The scope of the OED undertaking, and the level of scholarship it demanded, defies comprehension. Also, because the biggest book of my career thus far went to press yesterday, which was a soul-destroying multi-year effort, finishing this book the following day seemed weird--but appropriate. Making books is hard. Although Winchester gives an accessible, readable, and often wry account of how the OED came to be, and its permutations since, I wouldn't call it scintillating reading. But it's worth the effort. Highly recommended.

I was significantly happier with this book than the other Simon Winchester book I've read, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Like that book, this one is full of interesting digressions. However, Winchester's tendency toward imperialist and pro-colonialism digressions is less noticeable and less upsetting when the topic is an academic project that took place in Victorian England than when it is a massive natural disaster that occurred at roughly the same time, but in a Dutch colony.Although I only discovered this book by accident, while I'd been planning to read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary for a while, I suspect that this was a much better choice, since it focuses on the actual work of producing a truly unabridged dictionary, rather than on the personal lives of several people involved in its production.