The popular 18th-century lexicographer Nathaniel Bailey had trouble with some definitions. When he came to “spider” he copped out, with “an Insect well known”. Mind you, he had already dug deep into his reference file and told us that a cherry was “a fruit well known”. Nowadays dictionaries are, for the most part, serious, sober documents, with little room for excitement. But words are fun; language is fun. The Word Detective is my story of how a naive Eng Lit student with an inherent distrust of old-style academia landed an editorial job on the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1976, and gradually became engrossed in the people, the friendships, the words, the places and how the OED itself gradually adapted to the digital era.



These are 10 of the books that helped me along the way, and which showed me that I wasn’t the first person to discover there was more to lexicography than meets the eye.

1. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604)

Dictionaries of English didn’t exist before 1604, and so schoolmaster Cawdrey was blazing a trail. He didn’t produce what we’d think of as a dictionary. He left out all the easy words you’d already know (there’s some sense in that) and focused on the “hard words”. What’s worse, he wrote it for “the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or other unskilfull persons” who had neglected to enjoy a classical or grammar-school education, but who needed to know the meaning of oppilation (stopping) and saboth (rest). But Cawdrey made a sound beginning: they say that the first step is the hardest.

2. BE’s New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699)

The streets of Britain’s big cities were teeming with rogues and vagabonds in the 17th century, as least as far as BE – the forever unknown compiler who only ever revealed these initials – and his publisher would have us believe. Capitalising on this, BE’s dictionary gave the book-buying public their first chance to decode the frightening language of the “sturdy beggars” (beggars legally fit to work) or the homeless, shiftless soldiers returning from the European wars: famble-cheats (“Gold-rings, or Gloves”), member-mug (“a Chamber-pot”). Buy this and never be conned again!

3. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Johnson had little truck, at least in his dictionary, with the discourse of ordinary people: all fours (“a low game of cards”); crack (“a whore; in low language” and also “a boaster: this is only a low phrase”). But his agenda shifted from writing a dictionary showing the English language at its peak of perfection to one that captured the language as it shifted. And he was not averse, as we know, to the odd subjective definition: “excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid”. Naughty lexicography.

4. Oxford English Dictionary (1884-)

Our greatest dictionary (I would say that) was planned as a comprehensive index of English, containing every word and meaning ever used. The 19th-century editors soon realised that was too grand an aim: there was far too much esoteric scientific vocabulary, for example, that the ordinary, educated chap just didn’t need to know. So they left it out. But the dictionary soon settled down to include a glorious sweep of English of all types: formal, slang, British, American, South African, etc, and set the framework for national dictionaries across the world.

5. Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson (1886)

This dictionary of the English of the Raj was cleverly titled to give the impression that it was compiled by Messrs Hobson and Jobson. In fact, Hobson-Jobson is an anglicisation of an anguished Muslim cry uttered “in the procession of the Mo-harram”. The language of Anglo-India was fading when Yule and Burnell compiled their lively and discursive compendium, but it remains today to remind us of the remarkable and often problematic interaction between the British imperialists and the general Indian populace before Partition. It’s both great fun, and instructive. Where else would you find a hosbolhookum (an official document issued on royal authority)?

‘The language as it shifted’ … a copy of Samuel Johnson Johnson’s Dictionary. Photograph: Alamy

6. James Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909)

Ware enjoyed the camaraderie of London freemasonry and actors’ clubs at the end of the 19th century. Most of all, he haunted the music halls, especially south of the river, jotting down and preserving for us the vibrant street expressions that he heard all around him. His dictionary, sadly only published weeks before his death, glistens with idioms that passed under the radar of the standard dictionaries: What ho! she bumps! (“a satirical cry upon any display of vigour – especially feminine”), made temporarily famous by a popular song; cloddy, a put-down from the “dog market” meaning “aristocratic in appearance”. Dr Johnson would have shivered.

7. Frank Gelett Burgess’s Burgess Unabridged (1914)

Burgess subtitled his reference book “a new dictionary of words you have always needed”. It professed to have collected the slang of 1915. Burgess thought Webster a bit dull, and “Mrs Century” (the magnificent Century Dictionary) only a bit better. He offers a description and snuggly line-drawing of the huzzlecoo (“an intimate talk” or “a flirtation”), elaborates on quoobs (misfits) and recoils from the dogmix (“an unpleasant, uncomfortable, or dirty occupation … The type of the dogmix is cleaning fish”).

8. The Hacker’s Dictionary (1971)

This was the cult go-to reference for computer geeks when I first became involved with computers and dictionaries in the 80s. Its title dates from the time when hacker just meant an edgy computer enthusiast, nor an international criminal. The Hacker’s Dictionary wasn’t published as a book back then, but existed underground on vast computer systems. Nerds would check the latest uses, and mail the editors if they thought they had found or (modestly) invented a new one. It was a wiki before we had wikis, from the days when you needed to know about awk (“(UNIX techspeak) an interpreted language for massaging text data [etc, and then a bit more etc.]”). It’s published now, so part of the mainstream.

9. Robert Allen’s Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981)

This is my favourite edition of my favourite dictionary, which marks me down as a hopeless dictionary nerd. It contains only the information you might get wrong (St. and St, for instance: which is “saint” and which is “street”?). It’s an acquired taste.

10. The Urban Dictionary (1999–)

You go here to find out what a dictionary might have looked like in another dimension. Lots of it is spot-on, but lots of it is impressionistic. The trouble is, you can’t always tell which is which. It’s saved me on a few occasions (newspaper reports incorporating police slang that hadn’t come my way before), and lost me on others. I like its definition for suburban dictionary (“a place where suburban kids go to get definitions for urban terms and phrases”). As the dictionary reminds us, the “Urban Dictionary is just a subset of a truly Urbane Dictionary, ideally conceived”.

• The Word Detective by John Simpson is published by Little, Brown priced £18.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £15.57 including p&p.