Rare, Obsolete, New, Peculiar
Daisy Hay: Dictionary People, 19 October 2023
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Chatto, 384 pp., £22, September,978 1 78474 493 9 Show More
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Chatto, 384 pp., £22, September,
“... In my teens I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who lived two buses away and went to a different school ... ”