Sarah Ogilvie
Thursday 21st September 2023
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
N.B. Please note that this event has been cancelled due to unforeseen commitments in Sarah's diary. We are trying our best to rearrange a new date for 2024 but will be in touch with those who booked if and when this is confirmed. You should have been contacted already, but if you haven't heard anything, please get in touch with the Bookshop.
The Dictionary People
The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians.
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people's history of the OED. She traces the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language, from the eccentric autodidacts to the family groups who made word-collection their passion. With generosity and brio, Ogilvie reveals, for the first time, the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world - and celebrates to sparkling effect the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People.
About Sarah Ogilvie
Sarah Ogilvie teaches at the University of Oxford, and specializes in language, dictionaries, and technology. As a lexicographer she has been an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and was Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries in Australia. As a technologist she has worked in Silicon Valley at Lab 126, Amazon's innovation lab, where she was part of the team that developed the Kindle. She originally studied computer science and mathematics before taking her doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, and then taught at Cambridge and Stanford.