Don’t be puzzled. I am not Albus Dumbledore, the magical headmaster in Harry Potter. But nevertheless, there is a bit of magic about me. My name is James A.H. Murray, I am the chief-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary that has been called the world’s finest dictionary by some. Well, I am not a show-off, so I will leave it to you to decide if this comprehensive collection of English vocabulary is really magical. But to help your judgement, let me tell you something about the story of my lifework – a project, the size of which I underestimated a bit when I started work.

In the lecture on Modern English you have heard that people in the 18th and 19th century were very keen on having good dictionaries because they wanted to relate their use of English to an authoritative basis. Not being satisfied with the dictionaries of their time, the Philological Society of Great Britain, in 1857, resolved to compile a complete New English Dictionary. The goals were absolute: the dictionary had to include every word of the English language with all their various shades of meaning. Moreover, it had to indicate the origin and history of these words from the Anglo-Saxon times to the present and had to offer illustrative quotations to document this development. Since the aim of this project was extremely bold it took over 20 years to launch it.

In 1879, the Society finally agreed with Oxford University Press to start this enterprise. So the New Dictionary of English was renamed as Oxford English Dictionary. They appointed me, James A.H. Murray, as editor. Well, I was very glad to write this huge diary for my beloved mother-tongue. I planned the diary to be of the following size: 6'400 pages in 4 volumes to be produced within a period of 10 years.

Hhhhmmmm ...., well nice weather today, isn’t it.

... OK, yes, I admit I underestimated the size a tiny bit. After 5 years of 80 to 90 hours work per week, my team and I had published the words from A to ANT only (352 pages). So I had to realise that the project was indeed a mountain to move and therefore appointed further editors. The whole dictionary, however, was produced in fascicles over the next 44 years. Unfortunately, I could not experience its completion because I died 13 years before the final section appeared in 1928. The final size was enormous: 15'487 pages in 12 volumes covering 414'825 lexical items. (Fluent native speakers of English have a about 60'000 to 90'000 words stored in their mental lexicon.)

Work on the dictionary was not completed after 1928. Supplements and two further editions appeared between 1933 and 1986 adding another 70'000 new lexical items. In 1992, the dictionary appeared on CD-ROM.

The OED now consists of over 500'000 items and nearly 2½ million quotations. The length of the complete print run would be 8,6 km. In 2000 this masterpiece went online. Thus, you now have the chance to make rapid searches through this massive database.

Please, dear student of historical linguistics, honour me and my team of lexicographers – even J.R.R. Tolkien once worked on it! - by doing a couple of online searches in the following short tutorial and exercise on word etymology.

As you have heard, the OED is not only a collection of English words. It is also a huge etymological dictionary that tracks down the origin and lexical changes for all of its 500'000 entries. But what is etymology?

Etymology is the study of the history of lexical items. This investigation into the life of words involves the following dimensions:

1. The origin of given word.
2. The affinities the word established to other words.
3. The changes in meaning and form from the origin of the word to its present state.

Etymology is a subject that has always activated the linguistic interest of non-specialists. People often want to know what they regard as the true, genuine, and original meaning of a word and therefore often produce folk etymologies.

Consider the etymology of the idiom kick the bucket, for instance. This idiomatic expression is opaque, i.e. it is difficult to explain why the expression has the idiomatic meaning it has.

In one folk etymological explanation people have related the action of kicking the bucket to a suicidal HANGING-scenario:

The agent, who wants to kill himself, stands on a bucket to put his head into the noose; at the moment he kicks the bucket away from below his feet, the weight of the body pulls him down. As a consequence, he is strangled and dies.

Although being related to death, this explanation, however, seems unrealistic. The idiomatic meaning of kick the bucket denotes the process of dying rather than an act of suicide. So how then did the literal meaning kick the bucket become a homonym of the idiomatic meaning die?

The Oxford English Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Idioms provide a more realistic etymological explanation. According to these references, the idiom originates from an ancient method to slaughter pigs. Before being killed, the pigs’ feet were tied to a beam – called bucket in some English dialects – to prevent them from kicking out and to hang them up by the heels after being killed. At the moment the pigs were killed, they kicked the bucket for a last time. Therefore, this movement was seen as an indicator of their death.

The remotivation of the idiomatic expression shows that although folk etymologies can make sense, the original meaning of a word often remains unaccessible to present day users of English. Nevertheless, (folk) etymology has been employed to substantiate social critical arguments.

For instance, it has been argued by some feminist critics that woman is derived from womb-man (cf. Tutorial 2), or that history should be conceived as his-story. Thus, folk etymological (de)constructions can sometimes be found in ‘scientific’ argumentation. (This is not to say that feminist criticism is a pseudo-science per se, but that some arguments by some of its proponents are pseudo-science.) In deconstructivist theory, etymological argumentation has become popular through the work of Jacques Derrida. From a linguistic perspective, such arguments should be read very critically.

Etymology also reveals strange and surprising historical affinities between words. For instance, both salary and sausage have the same etymological root.

According to Crystal (1995: 136), salary came into English via French from Latin. There, salarium had the meaning ‘salt-money’, i.e. the money given to soldiers to buy precious salt. Sausage also entered English via French and also had its origin in Latin. Salsicum was a product made from salted meat. Thus, both salary and sausage have the word salt as their etymological basis.

Through changes in form and meaning, such relationships between words become fossilized. Since the meaning of the two words are so distinct from a present day perspective, nobody would suspect them to be derived from a similar conceptual background.

Thus, a final fascinating dimension of etymology is semantic change. Etymological investigation can unveil drastic processes of semantic adaptation of a given word.

Silly for instance goes back to OE sælig (Germ. selig) with the meaning 'happy', 'blessed'. In ME times this meaning was shifted to 'innocent'. From there, it became silly = 'deserving of compassion' in Early Modern times. This meaning was then generalised to 'weak' and from this general bodily meaning is was mapped onto the mental domain, meaning 'feeble-minded' and 'foolish'.

A very interesting semantic field for etymological analysis is food. The history of food-terminology in English reflects the history of this country in an impressive manner. You are what you eat! So think about the history of English vocabulary when you next enter a pub, Chinese or Indian take-away, or kebap bar in London ...