So Professor Sarah Ogilvy, thank you. Thank you, Sarah, and many thanks to the whole team here, Christine and Jason, and everyone for your support, and thank you to each of you for coming out this evening. It's just so special to be in this esteemed institution to know that lectures have been going on here for several hundreds of years. I don't know whether anyone's spoken about dictionaries before. I hope that they have. Because tonight I was thinking if we think of famous locations for dictionaries, London may not immediately come to mind. I think most people around the world, when they think of a famous location for a dictionary, they'll think of Oxford. People who know a little bit more about dictionaries, lexicologists, they might think of Coventry, because Coventry is actually where the first English dictionary was written in 1604 by Robert Caudry, and it was called a table alphabetical. Now, Americans probably think of Springfield, Massachusetts, which is home of Webster's dictionary. If you're from Germany, you'll probably think of Castle, which is a little town in Germany where the brothers Grimm in 1838 started their famous Deutsche Würtebuch. This dictionary actually took 123 years to finish. So the brothers Grimm, who we all probably know them best for their fairy tales, but they wrote their fairy tales. They wrote Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel in their spare time. Their main job was as lexicographers, as dictionary makers, and it was this wonderful dictionary that they started. And this dictionary was very important because it started 20 years before the Oxford English Dictionary started, and it was a blueprint. It was a blueprint. The lexicographers for the Oxford English Dictionary based many of their lexicographic policies and methods on the Grimms Dictionary. If you're French, you probably think of northwestern Paris, which is where Emi Littre wrote his Dictionnaire de la Longue Française. And if you're Italian, it will be Florence. Florence is where the dictionary of the Academia de la Crusca was written in 1612. But London deserves to be on the dictionary map. Not least because very close to here at 17 Gough Square is where Samuel Johnson, in the attic there, wrote his famous Dictionary of the English language in 1755. But it was a hundred years after that, in 1858, that the Oxford English Dictionary was started here in London. And it was where actually hundreds of Londoners helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. So its first 26 years of life was here in London. So let me tell you tonight the story of the OED and why and how so many Londoners came to help it be created. As you'll know, the Oxford English Dictionary, oh, that's Samuel Johnson. This, of course, is the Oxford English Dictionary, which, as you'll know, is the largest English dictionary in the world. This is the second edition that came out in 1989. And it has half a million headwords. I worked as an editor on the third edition, so the third edition of the dictionary started in the year 2000. And that is the first edition that is a complete revision of the first edition. And when they started it in the year 2000, I came on board in 2001, but when they started it, they decided to start the revision on the letter M because they figured they didn't want to be superimposing their lexicographic teething problems on the teething problems of the longest-serving editor, James Murray, because of course he started at the letter A. So they started on the letter M when they knew that James Murray was right in his stride lexicographically. And there was a team, in fact, there still is a team of 75 people. Every day, 75 people at the offices of Oxford University Press on Walton Street in Oxford are working on the OED. And the letter M took 75 of us six years to finish. And the reason is because of the level of scholarship and rigor that goes into every entry within the dictionary. But tonight we are going to be focusing on the first edition. And in fact, the the OED, when it first started, had the title The New English Dictionary. It began to be known as the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1890s, but in fact that title wasn't on the spine of the dictionary until 1933. So the OED is quite special. Not only is it much larger than your normal dictionary, but there are two things to know about dictionaries. There are two types of dictionaries. There are synchronic dictionaries and there are diachronic dictionaries. And synchronic dictionaries, synchronos, they give you a snapshot of language at a moment in time. So they're like your smaller pocket dictionary, your concise Oxford, whereas diachronic dictionaries are quite different animals. They look at language across time, diachronos. And what that means is that within the dictionary, the entries look quite different. So you will have the headword, then the pronunciation, the part of speech, then you will have a list of all different spelling variants across the centuries. Then you will have your etymology, where the word comes from, and then your definition, but it's what comes after the definition that makes the diachronic dictionary so special. This is the quotation paragraph. You can see here that it tells you the very first time that a word was ever used in a written source, and then it follows the life of that word across the centuries to the year as close to the year that the lexicographers are constructing that particular entry. So in this case, the word joy here, the first time that it's used is in the Ankrene rule in 1225, and the quotation paragraph follows the life of joy right down until 1867. So if you can put yourself into the shoes of the lexicographer and imagine that you're creating this quotation paragraph, it's really different, it's really difficult to create it. Because can you imagine trying to find the very first time that a word was ever used in a written source? Where do you look? Where do you where do where do you go to try and find that very first instance? And that was the question that these three men asked themselves. These three men were the they met here in London at the London Philological Society in 1858, and they came to the society with the suggestion of creating a new dictionary. As I said, Johnson's dictionary had been around for a hundred years, but these men wanted something different because, in fact, within linguistics, or rather within the philological world, Europe had developed a scientific approach to language since Johnson's dictionary. And therefore, by the middle of the 19th century, scholars began to see the deficiencies of Johnson's dictionary. And these three men proposed a dictionary that was comprehensive. They wanted the dictionary to include every word in the English language, and they wanted the dictionary to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. What they meant by that is they wanted to go and describe exactly how people are using words rather than prescribe and telling people how they should be using them. The other thing that they wanted is they realized that if they were going to produce this kind of dictionary, they knew that a small group of men in London or in Oxford couldn't do that alone. So they came up with the radical idea of crowdsourcing. This is one of the first crowdsourcing projects in the world, and they had no idea whether this would be a success or not. They put out the word, they put out advertisements in newspapers and in journals. They put advertisements on leaflets that they distributed through clubs and societies because if you think of the 19th century, the equivalent of social media today were clubs and societies, similar to Gresham, where people with similar interests would come together to think about and discuss certain topics. So they advertised throughout clubs and societies. And they decided to not not to restrict it just to Britain. If you think of it, this is the middle of the 19th century, when the British Empire was reaching its peak, and they decided to draw on English from all around the world. One of these founders, Frederick Fernival, he has a famous quote where he says, we must fling our doors wide, wide. Fling them wide, all must enter. And what he means by that, I think, is not only must all words be included within this dictionary, but all people must be included in the construction of the dictionary. So they asked people all around the world to read their local books and to send them in their local words. And they said to them, can you write them out on little two by six inch pieces of paper? And can you make sure that the word that you're exemplifying, you write that in the top left-hand corner? Then they said, tell us the book that you're taking the word from. And we want it to be as precise as possible because this is going to be a scholarly, a very rigorous text where every word must be able to be verified. And so they said, can you please put the date of the book, the author, the title, the page number, and then the actual example. And that, of course, that quotation is going to go ultimately into that quotation paragraph which we saw there. They had no idea whether this would be a success or not, but in fact, so many people sent in slips that the longest serving editor, James Murray, this is a picture of him with his editorial assistants in his scriptorium. So many people sent in slips that the Royal Mail had to put a red pillar box outside his house just to cope with the level and the amount of mail and post. This is Murray in what he called his scriptorium. But Murray and his wife had 11 children. And when Murray started the dictionary, he was writing it within his house. So Murray took over in 1879 and he started to write the dictionary inside his house, and his long-suffering wife, Ada, said, Murray, you James, you have to get out of the house. You can just imagine all the slips and the books. And she pushed him out into the garden where he built this garden shed out of corrugated iron. And to actually build the shed, they had to dig into the ground a bit. So the walls were actually half into the sunken garden. And you can imagine that it was cold and dank in winter. There are stories of the lexicographers wrapping their legs in newspaper just to keep warm. And Murray was absolutely dedicated to this task. He would get up at 4 a.m. and he would work until midnight. So this is, oh, and I'll just show you what some of the other slips looked like. So sometimes the lexicographers knew the exact book that they wanted someone to read. And they wanted that person to read the book and write as many slips and write out as many quotations as possible. So some of the slips they would send them blank with already printed out, as you can see here, with the date, the author, and the title to just help the reader write this out faster. Now people were volunteering their work, okay? They were doing this all for free. Some people would just cut out the book and paste it onto the slip. And people wouldn't even, some of them wouldn't even paste it on. They would just, you know, rip out the piece and send it in. And all of these slips are kept. They're all still exist today. And they're down in the basement of Oxford University Press. So when I worked as an as an editor on the dictionary, often I would be revising an entry which hadn't been touched since James Murray wrote it. And I would have questions. I wonder why he chose this particular quotation. And so I would go down into the basement and find the box and find the slip. So all of those slips are kept, they're all ordered in alphabetical order. And when you go through the slips, what becomes clear is that the editors were great recyclers. They would use the backs of letters and different things. So always it's a good idea to look on the reverse side of the slips. And many of the slips, when you turn them over, are like this one on a chocolate wrapper. And this seems to be the favorite chocolate flavor, the favorite brand of chocolate of one of the editors called Arthur Mailing. So as I said, I'd often go down into that basement and I'd look around all of the boxes of slips, and there are about two million slips down there. And I've always, in fact, many scholars have wondered who all those people were around the world who read their local books and sent in their slips. Now we've known who some of them are because Oxford University Press are very savvy with their business, and they realized that they didn't want to wait until the dictionary was finally finished. Because what I forgot to tell you is when they started the dictionary here in London in 1858, they thought that it would take two years to finish. Then they thought it would take ten, but it actually took 70. So the dictionary started in 1858 and wasn't finished until 1928. So what Oxford decided to do is rather than wait until it was finished, they decided to publish the dictionary in little chunks of the alphabet. So they're called fascicles. So there were 126 fascicles from 1884 until 1928. And if you go through, what Murray did is he wrote a preface at the front of each of those fascicles. And if you go through and read those prefaces, he often thanks people. So if you're a nerd, which I definitely am, I've read all of those prefaces and written down the names. So we knew that there were several hundred people. But I would be down in that basement and I'd see these millions of slips, thinking there have to be more than several hundred people. But we didn't know who they were until, oh, and this is a box, this is what the slips look like down in down in the down in the basement. About 10 years ago, I was taking up a new job at Stanford in America. And thankfully, although I didn't, I wasn't thankful at the time, but my my um my visa for America was delayed. So I was stuck in Oxford for a couple of weeks, and I decided to go and visit my favorite places just to say bye-bye to them. And one of them is down in that base basement. So I was looking through various boxes, and I took the lid off one particular box, and the box itself was very light, which seems strange. Took the lid off, and inside I found a little black book tied with cream ribbon. And I'd never seen this book before. I undid it, and when I opened it, I immediately recognized James Murray's immaculate handwriting. And this turned out to be his 150-year-old address book. And in this address book, he had the names and addresses of all those people around the world. And not just their names and their addresses, but he he had meticulously listed every book that each person had read, the number of slips per book that they had written out, and then the date of when he had received them. And for me, time just stood still because I realized that with this document, with this object, we could finally answer the question who all those people were. And I ended up finding three address books belonging to James Murray in the basement. And then the following summer I found three address books belonging to James Murray's predecessor, Frederick Furnival, who I mentioned before. So with these six address books, I went to Stanford, and Stanford loved this project. And I basically just wanted, I was just curious, I wanted to know who all those people were. And my students loved the project, and together as a team, we researched every person. So I'll show you what the address. This was one of the address books. This is what it looks like inside, where you have the person's name, all the books that they read, that they read, the number of slips that they sent in, and the date. And Murray, there are letters in here. It's a wonderful document where he writes notes about people. Oh, and also what became clear looking through the address books was just the volume and the amount of slips that people sent in. So for example, here we can see William Douglas, who lived in Primrose Hill in London. Turns out that he sent in 151,000 slips. And he seems to have had rashes on particular words. So you you can see here that the titles of those books are all to do with the human body. So there's diseases of the skin, diseases of the ear, and he goes through. So he was quite obsessed, I think, with the human body. He sends in thousands of slips about the human body over about a 12 year period, and then he changes to some other topic. So he was incredibly dedicated to this task. He and in fact several others spent time in psychiatric institutions, and I don't actually think that. That so, actually, the top four contributors all had connections to psychiatric hospitals. At the time, they were called lunatic asylums. So I ended up writing a book about this because these people were just too captivating not to share with a wide audience. And so there is a whole chapter on L for Lunatic, which is a really unfortunate name, but it's the name that in fact the British census added a column in 1871 for people who were blind, deaf, dumb, and lunatics. So you can imagine it was very difficult to trace these. It turns out to that there are 3,000 people. And to research each of them, what is particular about them is they're not the famous professionals and scholars who you might expect helping to create this prestigious dictionary. But they're the autodidacts, many of them left school at 14. They're the amateurs, they're the everyday people who just wanted to contribute and support this majestic project. And so the top four contributors were in and out of institutions, and apart from one of them who actually murdered someone, the others I think were probably just like me. They were on the spectrum, and this kind of repetitive task really suited them. The other sweet thing about Murray's address books is that he would write little notes about people. So when women, oh, and that's the other thing, we now know that there are hundreds of women, there are 500 women contributing to this project at a time when that was remarkable because women didn't have the same educational opportunities as men. And when a lot of the women would get married, Murray would cross out their surname and put their married name and cross out where they were living and say they are now living here. When people would die, you can see there, Murray would put a note that they had died. There were little symbols and codes throughout the dictionary, um, through through throughout the address book, which I was intrigued to solve. So there are there's like a Star of David, there's D3, D5, there are entries where people um where they're underlined in red. Turns out that they're the Americans. There were uh many more Americans than you would think for a product and a dictionary which we think of quintessentially British. Um the Americans, 10% of the people were from America. And then there are other notes. You you you can see here for uh Vernon Lushington, who lived in Kensington Square here in London, Murray has written across it, no good. And there are lots of notes similar to this. In fact, there are there are so many people who had notes like stole the book or imposter or hopeless, that in fact there's a I just had to put a whole chapter in H for hopeless. Um of the most hopeless was actually this this woman, Eleanor Marx, daughter of the famous Karl Marx. Eleanor Marx really annoyed Murray for for several reasons. One, she insisted on being paid. Good on you, Eleanor, I would expect nothing less. Um she insisted on being paid, and as I said, this was extremely rare. People were doing this freely. Uh so first of all, Murray was a little miffed by that, and then all that she did is she went in to the British Library, which was part of the British Museum then, and she just took an existing glossary off the shelf and wrote out slips from it and sent it in to Murray, which of course was useless. But that's that's another thing about this project that there were London institutions that were absolutely key to the success of this project, and the British Library was definitely one of them. So this is the picture of Murray, which we've had until now as this sole editor, and yet I think it's really clear now that it's more than Murray, and in fact, without these dedicated and devoted people sending in all of these words and giving freely of their time and their effort, the dictionary could never have been written. So that that was motivating me over the last, well, to research all of those people and to write the book took me eight years. And I was motivated for them. I really wanted to shine a light on these people and to finally give them credit. Because in in fact, the highest contributor, the person who sent in the most slips, was come someone called Thomas Austen, and he sent in 165,000 slips. And yet, where does his name appear? His name appears as an appendix to the preface in the first volume. So we haven't really known very much about Thomas Austen, and I'll tell you a little bit about him later, but I thought I'd just, in the time remaining, um, I'd just tell you a bit about some of the key Londoners who uh who gave so generously to this project. And I'm starting with Margaret Murray, no relation to James Murray. And why I'm starting with with her is she ends up living here in London, but she starts her life in Calcutta in India. Because I wanted to just signal how this is a global project. There were people dedicated to this project all throughout the British Empire, but also outside of the British Empire. The address books show us that there were people in South America, people in Japan. This is a truly global project. So Margaret Murray starts contributing to the dictionary as a teenager. She's living in Calcutta, and she would wake up early in the morning before the sun really rises and before it was too hot. And she would take a book from her mother's bookshelf, and her mother had two main genres of books. One was biblical and theological books, and the other, the other books were travelers' tales. So it's thanks to Margaret Murray that there are so many Indian words in the first edition of the dictionary. So she would take a book and she'd take it up to the stuff up to the roof of the house where she'd sit with her cat called Dapple and she'd copy out slips. Now, how do I know that that she that that she had a cat called Dapple? I know that because Margaret Murray lived to be 100. And on her 100th birthday, she published her memoir called My First Hundred Years. And this book is one of my favorite books now. You can find copies on Abe Books, and I recommend it. It's absolutely wonderful because she tells the story of her life. So she spends the first um uh 10 years living in Calcutta, uh, where she trains to be a nurse and she sends in 5,000 slips uh to do with Indian travelers' words, or no, from travelers' tales and their Indian words, and then she comes to London to visit her sister. And she thought, she then decides to stay living in England, and she spends the rest of her life here in London, but she has trouble getting a job because I've learnt so many things from this book. But in the 1870s and 1880s, there was a restriction on the height of a nurse, and you had to be over, I think it was four foot eleven, and she was shorter, so she couldn't practice as a nurse, so she doesn't know what to do. And she goes to a lecture at University College London with her sister, where the famous archaeologist Flinders Petrie is giving a lecture, and they're sitting there, and he was renowned as a captivating orator. And at the end of this lecture, the audience stands and they're clapping him, and she turns to her sister and she says, I'm going to work with this man. I want to be an archaeologist. And she does. She becomes one of the first female archaeologists, and she travels, she becomes, she specializes in Egyptology, and she travels through the Middle East with Flinders Petrie, and together they write many articles, even though credit doesn't come to her until she is in her late 60s when they finally make her a professor at UCL. So that's why I wanted to start the book with Margaret Murray and start tonight's lecture with her, because I wanted to shine a light on her. She also becomes a specialist in witch, in witchcraft, and she writes two seminal books on the history of witchcraft in the middle of the 20th century. So her journey with the Oxford English Dictionary comes a full circle because after the 1950s, other readers read her books, send in slips, and quotations from Margaret Murray get into the dictionary. Oh, also just a fun thing is that rumour has it that in the Department of Archaeology at UCL, if she didn't agree with some of the new appointments, she would set up and do a little spell in a saucepan, which I liked. To research this project, I had to go to many different libraries around the world. And as I mentioned before, the highest contributor was a man called Thomas Austen. And I didn't realize what a common name Thomas Austen was in the late 19th century. He was actually the most difficult person for me to find out anything about. Because in this letter, this is a letter from James Murray, and he's writing to Frederick Furnival, his predecessor. And the eight-page letter is all about Thomas Austen. And it says, Austen's is a painful case. And he goes on to explain, even though we know that this man sent in 165,000 slips just within a 10-year period. So he was dedicating every day to this task. Thomas Austen, it turns out, he wanted to join the scriptorium as an official editor. And he would go to the door of the scriptorium, and this letter describes how he would plead to not only work there but to also be paid for his labor. So they actually fall out. Thomas Austen and James Murray fall out and they stop speaking to one another. But Thomas Austen keeps contributing to the dictionary, and in fact, he moves. He moved around to many different places, and as I mentioned, he also spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. But but he finally moves just around the corner from the British Library so that he can go daily and he keeps sending in slips. So we have him to thank for so much. This is another great Londoner. This is Alexander John Ellis, who it turns out, so one of my key questions for this project is who were the hubs? Who were the most important people? Well, I had two questions. Who were also, which clubs and societies were also most important to spreading the word about this project? And then who were the most important people? And I went to mathematics for this, to graph theory, where you can get two particular measures in networks. One, as Sarah will know, is eigenvector centrality, where you can find out which nodes in a network are connected to the most important people. And then one other measure is betweenness. And betweenness measure tells you who's connected to the most to the highest number of people. So I collaborated with a wonderful physicist at King's College, Cambridge, and it turns out, so you know, I think everyone who knows a little bit about the dictionary probably thinks that James Murray was the key hub. Those who know a little bit more, I would have said it was probably Frederick Furnival, because Frederick Furnival was this big, colourful character who wore pink bow ties and was a complete extrovert, and he did bring a lot of people to the project, but in fact the mathematics showed us someone completely different. It showed us A.J. Ellis. So suddenly I could focus on him and research him, and it made total sense. So I'll tell you just briefly a little bit about him. It's thanks to him, actually, that Oxford took on the project of publishing the dictionary for a period there before Oxford said yes. It was looking like Cambridge University Press might have said yes. And in fact, if you go to the headquarters of Cambridge University Press, they have a very snazzy reception area where they've carved into, where they've engraved into the glass the timeline of the press, and they've put the date where they turned down the Oxford English Dictionary. So it's thanks to Ellis that Oxford took on the task, and it's also thanks to Ellis that John that James Murray became the editor because James Murray was not an obvious candidate. James Murray came from the Scottish borders and he left school at 14. And he taught himself languages from reading different versions of the Gospels. And when when they brought him on to be the editor, he was a schoolmaster at Millhill School in North London. So Ellis actually started his life with a different surname. He started his life with the surname Sharp. But when he was 11, his mother's cousin, whose surname was Ellis, and he was very wealthy, he said to this man's mother, I'll give your son my complete fortune if he changes his name from Sharp to Ellis. So his mother thought and said, Yes, please. So from that moment, Ellis went to Eton. He then reads mathematics and music at Trinity, Cambridge, and he's eccentric and wonderful. And he then never has to work. So he becomes your quintessential gentleman scholar. He is known for wearing a huge overcoat, which he called Dreadnought, which had 28 pockets. And I found a wonderful description of someone saying that you always knew when Ellis was coming into a room because he sounded like a kitchen drawer. Inside this coat was a tuning fork, a piece of cake just in case friends got peckish, a book in case you had to wait somewhere. Yeah, so he was superb. And he becomes a pioneer in sound, and he writes a famous four-volume work on pronunciation and accents around Britain. And he also advises the dictionary on words to do with language, on phonetics and phonology. He invents different dictionaries, different languages because he feels that for social justice reasons, English is too difficult for people to read at that time. So he comes up with a whole new spelling for English called glossotype. I wanted also just to show you this photo. This is a photo of Murray's family because not so much. So Murray's family, the entire family got involved in this project. Murray's 11 children, when the slips would come to the house, the children would unpack the packages and they would sort them alphabetically into the pigeonholes, and Murray would pay them a penny an hour to do that. But there were also within London many families who contributed to the dictionary. And within the address books, Murray would list each member of the family and be very particular about the books and the slips that each person sent in. And oh, there were suffragists as well, especially the famous Emily Davies from St. John's Wood. She, of course, founded Girton College, Cambridge. And here we are at Gresham. So I wanted to show you that in fact Gresham played an important role in the creation of the dictionary through its professor of geometry. This is Carl Pearson, whose name is down on the board there, alongside Sarah's as the professor of geometry here. He was professor here from 1890 to 1894, and his Gresham lectures were turned into a very famous book called The Grammar of Science. That's a book that Einstein found a foundational text. And he is really known as the founder of statistics. But he was also known for many other things. In particular, he was also known for founding a sex club. This was a club called the Men and Women's Club, and it was a monthly club where 10 women and ten men would come together to discuss sex and to discuss prostitution and marriage and notions of friendship versus sex. So I was intrigued to know what he helped the dictionary on. I thought, oh, maybe he helped on sex words or something. So I went to the archive and no, he contributed to the science words. And so in particular, his Gresham lectures discuss elasticity, force, energy, and all of these words are ones which he corresponded to Murray on and helping Murray with the definitions of them. So he didn't help on the sex words, but another Londoner did, and it's this man, Henry Spencer Ashby, who lived in Bloomsbury. He had the world's largest collection of pornography. He was a businessman who from the outside looked very uh unexciting, but in fact he he had two wives with two completely different families. And he, you can imagine, so he sent in many sex words to the dictionary. And you could imagine uh Murray, who was um a very committed uh Presbyterian, he was he he didn't drink, he he was um uh very dedicated to his work, and you could imagine him perhaps blushing when these bundles of slips came in. And he was probably faced with the uh dilemma does he include the words and be very true to what he saw as a scientific historical project, where if a word is used in an English context, then it deserves A place within the dictionary, or perhaps does he lower the moral tone of the text? Thankfully, he went with the former and he put all of those words in. So again, I learnt about pornography in the 1880s. A lot of it had to do with bondage. So actually, there are a lot of words in the first edition to do with bondage. And then thanks to Henry Spencer Ashby. Now, when Ashby died, he gave the British Museum his two collections. So one of them was all the pornography, the other collection was Cervantes. And I've been to the British Museum Archive to look through the committee meeting where they're discussing what they are going to do with this gift to the museum because they wanted the Cervantes, but they weren't quite sure about the pornography. So they they actually decided to take both. They burnt a lot of the pornography. They kept a portion of it aside, which they locked in this cabinet. I forget it's sort of like cabinet 268 or something. And that cabinet remained locked until the 1970s. And they've still preserved it. So you can go into the British Library and actually ask for some of the materials from this locked cabinet. So in the time remaining, oh, this is one of my favorite contributors who appears in the Elve for Lunatics chapter. I don't have time to go into it, but this man he started contributing to the dictionary as a teenager. And as soon as Murray received this man's work, this man's called John Dormer, he recognized this young man's brilliance. And when you write a definition, you're faced with all of these quotations, and you have to tease out the nuances of meaning within the quotations, because of course many words are polysimous, or they have lots of senses within the word, and you've got to try and tease out what those senses are. And it can be extremely difficult to do, especially thinking of some of the entries in the dictionary. So the word set is famous for being the longest entry, which goes for 42 pages. Okay. So you can imagine being faced with hundreds of slips and trying to work out and tease out the meaning. So Murray decides to switch this, and he sends this man slips and asks him to sort them out. So John Dormer spends 10 years doing this incredibly intensive, labor-intensive task. And by he's 28, it's Christmas, he's alone, his wife had died in September, and he's working on the word sound, and he's trying to work out all the different nuances of meaning of sound, and he begins to hear voices and to hear noise, and he thinks that the neighbors are coming in. I know this because I've read the doctor's description from the psychiatric hospital, where he describes he thinks that the neighbors are shooting darts at him. And the diagnosis, so what he does when he's hearing this is he opens the drawer and he takes out a revolver. And I won't spoil it just in case any of you wanted to read more about him, but it's a really sad case and it tells us a lot about Murray because I won't spoil it. Um but it was very important for me to shine a light on John Dormer and for the incredible contribution. So Murray ends up sending him 250,000 slips over the 12-year period that he works for Murray. All of it doing it for free. So this is the final image of the wonderful James Murray. This was taken in 1915, two weeks before Murray died. If you go through all of the slips looking for Murray's handwriting, the final slip alphabetically with his writing on it is in the letter T. So James Murray died on the letter T not knowing whether his life's work would ever be finished or not. It was 12 years later, 13 years later. Yes, but he died not knowing whether it would ever be finished. And that slip, that final slip, is the word twilight. So I like to think that he may have been working on the word twilight in this photo. And just very quickly, a little going out of London, just to let you know that the dictionary, that these dictionary people still exist today. And when I started to work for Oxford Dictionary, it was down in Australia. And I would open up the mail, and every month, this man, Mr. Collier, who actually is from my hometown of Brisbane, Australia, he would send in slips every month, and they'd be eccentrically wrapped in corn cornflake packets with bits of dog hair and cereal. Well, at least I hoped that it was dog hair stuck on them. And the the unusual thing about all of his slips is they all came from the local paper in my hometown, the newspaper called the Korea Mail. Not the most esteemed media source, but he sent in a hundred thousand slips, all of them from the Koreer Mail. This is what they looked like. And I um so when you're a lexicographer, it's a if if if if you want to stay fit and really um on point with your editing, it's a good thing to edit a children's dictionary because with children's dictionaries you've got to try and be as simple and concise as possible, which is always the hardest to do. So I used to go down to Australia quite regularly and write children's dictionaries. So I was down there once at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, and I said to them all, Oh, does Mr. Collier still send in slips? Now, the thing about Mr. Collier's packages is he always only gave a P.O. box address. So we never knew exactly where he he lived. And they said to me, Oh yes, he still sends in slips. And the next day he actually rang the center. And so I got onto the phone and I said, Mr. Collier, I would love to meet you. And I'm coming up to see my family in Brisbane. Um, could could we meet? So he said, Oh yes, he said, we can meet. I'll meet you in the in the park behind the Paddo Tavern. Now, the Paddo Tavern is a bit of a rough pub, so I was like, oh, okay. So I went there and I walked in, and there he was, sitting on a park bench, reading, of all things, the Courier Mail. And when and I thought, now I wonder how many slips exist from the Courier Mail. So I did a little analysis, and there are more quotations now in the Oxford English Dictionary from the Brisbane Courier Mail than there are from Virginia Wolf or T. S. Eliot. And I said, Mr. Collier, what do you say to the suggestion that we flew you over to England and gave you a tour of the OED and showed you the work of the lexicographers as a thank you for this incredible contribution? And he thought for a moment and he said, Oh, I couldn't possibly just imagine all the career males waiting for me. So I hope that that just gives you a glimpse into really an extraordinary project and extraordinary people who were dedicated and devoted, especially here in um London. And I'd be delighted to ask any, to answer any questions which you might have. So thank you.