The very first part of what became the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1884 and covering the range from A to Ant, did not include the word “African.” It did, however, include “American.” One might conclude from this evidence that the O.E.D., generally written by and for Victorian gentlemen, was biased against Africans.

But the real reason “African” was left out was rather different, and much less nefarious: James Murray, the dictionary’s first editor, made an early editorial decision that the O.E.D. would not include any proper nouns—this was regarded as the province of the encyclopedia, not the dictionary—and that words formed from proper nouns would likewise be excluded. This was a poor policy, which was quickly rescinded: “American” was duly entered when editorial work progressed deeper into the letter A, but by then it was too late to make changes in the “af-” section. It wasn’t until 1933, when Oxford University Press published “The Oxford English Dictionary: Being a Corrected Re-issue with an Introduction, Supplement, and Bibliography of a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles” (now referred to as the “1933 Supplement”), that this omission was rectified.

The linguist Sarah Ogilvie, a former director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre who herself worked as an editor for the O.E.D., has gained considerable attention for her new book, “Words of the World: The Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary.” An article about the book in the Guardian—excerpted on Gawker and many other places, and widely retweeted—highlighted the claim that Robert Burchfield, the editor of the four-volume “Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” published from 1972 to 1986, “covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins.”

This claim is completely bogus.

The 1933 Supplement was intended to catch the O.E.D. up on the forty-nine years since the first part of the dictionary was published; O.E.D. editors by that point had assembled, its Preface states, “a collection of closely-packed slips occupying some 75 linear feet of shelving” as a basis for their updates. The huge changes of this era (including the rising influence of American English, which was singled out in the Preface) gave rise to a wide variety of words that were not included in the original publication of O.E.D., mostly because they were genuinely new, having arisen or come to prominence after the relevant volume was published (some examples are “automobile,” “cubism,” “damfool,” “pacifist,” “robot,” “talkies,” “zoom”), and much attention was given to technical terms, slang, foreignisms, and the like. But the need for even more extensive revisions was soon apparent, and by the nineteen-fifties Oxford University Press decided that a major new supplement was required.

When Burchfield—a New Zealand medievalist who originally came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar—was appointed in 1957 to the editorship of a new supplement for the O.E.D., he was charged with producing an update of the dictionary, originally intended to be one volume completed in seven years, but ultimately taking up four volumes of over five thousand seven hundred pages, delivered twenty-nine years after he began his project. Burchfield’s task was not to revise the 1933 Supplement, which would always be available for consultation, but to produce a new work, extending the entire O.E.D., with relevant material included from the 1933 Supplement as necessary. The misunderstanding about the purpose of Burchfield’s Supplements is the source of the current controversy.

Burchfield “absorbed most, but not all” of the 1933 Supplement into his volumes, as the historian of lexicography Charlotte Brewer has written, and this was not “covert” in any way: in the Preface to the first volume of his work, Burchfield wrote specifically of his treatment of the 1933 Supplement, describing his “rejecting only those words, phrases, and senses that seemed transitory or too narrowly restricted in currency.” Even this was not some rogue decision by an uppity new editor; the editors of the 1933 Supplement also wrestled with how to treat these terms—the evidence for which was often new, sparse, or both—and admitted that “it cannot be hoped or pretended that this problem has been solved in every instance with infallible discretion.”

So what Burchfield did was not deletion, it was editing. Despite the size of Burchfield’s Supplements, he was under severe space constraints, constantly fending off demands to cut back from Oxford University Press, concerned with the rising costs and receding deadlines, and it was hard to justify carrying over seemingly unimportant words from the 1933 Supplement for a new work that was meant to stand on its own.

The omitted words were in many categories; some non-foreign examples from the early part of the alphabet include “abactinally,” “abolitional,” “abrasable,” “automobilize,” and “botryogen.” Many such words are clearly of dubious importance; other words have subsequently proved to be less ephemeral than Burchfield thought. In any case, all of the entries that Burchfield omitted are being added to the completely revised third edition of the O.E.D., which is now being published online.

Deciding what to include is always difficult: in 1903, the editors of the O.E.D. decided not to include an entry for the very new word “radium,” an unfortunate omission that, like “African,” was made good in the 1933 Supplement. Even more famously, in 1891 Murray omitted “appendicitis,” on the advice of the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, only to see the dictionary criticized in 1902 when the coronation of Edward VII was delayed because of his appendicitis, an event which made the word widely known.

Sarah Ogilvie has closely analyzed the patterns of what Burchfield decided to leave out, and concluded that he was less accepting of foreign borrowings than other editors. But omitting some foreignisms doesn’t mean that he didn’t value this category of words. Indeed, he was insistent that the O.E.D. should expand its coverage of international words in English, and, although he did leave out some seemingly minor terms from his Supplement, he added many thousands of more fully researched global entries. Thus, even if it is true that Burchfield omitted foreignisms at a higher rate than other things, this does not mean that he was hostile to these words. Burchfield found it preferable to give the limited space (and effort) available to some of the many other words that he had to consider for inclusion. The examples I listed above show that words of all kinds, not just words from non-British varieties of English, might be assessed as marginal.

A long-standing myth about the O.E.D. is that it is a stuffy work, containing only words that would be acceptable to a Victorian gentleman. But the O.E.D. has always been inclusive of a wide variety of English—slang, foreign borrowings, scientific words, dialect. The process of creating a dictionary involves many small decisions, and studying the result of these decisions can be fascinating: Did the editors privilege male authors? Should American books have been quoted more? How did the editors decide when a foreign word could be considered English?

In fact, Ogilvie’s book itself is rather different from how it was portrayed in the Guardian story. It is a sober analysis of the approaches to loanwords taken by various O.E.D. editors, and does not attribute malice to Robert Burchfield’s rational editorial decisions. It does exactly what a work of historical scholarship should do: provide a close analysis of editorial decisions, and interpret them. It is a damfool shame that the media chose to exaggerate one aspect of this to create a controversy where none existed.

Jesse Sheidlower is Editor at Large, Oxford English Dictionary, and President Elect of the American Dialect Society.

Illustration by Richard McGuire.