On Friday afternoon, the Oxford English Dictionary’s Web site appealed to the public for help in identifying a mysterious book, “Meanderings of Memory.” The book is cited as an early source for words like “chapelled” (“adj. placed or stationed in a chapel”), “revirginize” (“trans. to render virginal again”) and forty-seven others. “We have been unable to trace this title in library catalogues or text databases,” they announced,

All these quotations have a date of 1852, and some cite the author as ‘Nightlark’. The only evidence for this book’s existence that we have yet been able to find is a single entry in a bookseller’s catalogue: Have you ever seen a copy of this book? Can you identify the ‘well-known connoisseur’ mentioned by the bookseller?

The humorous particulars of the plea (the connoisseur who calls himself “Nightlark,” the title that sounds like the work of a French flaneur) will surely stoke the energies of lexicographic sleuths the world over. On Twitter, there was some excited speculation, but so far, the case remains unsolved.

I asked Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press, about how the search had come about. Her answer amounted to a mini-history of the O.E.D.’s longtime practice of calling on the general public to aid its lexicographers. “We like to say the O.E.D. has been crowdsourcing since before there was a word for crowdsourcing,” she said.

In 1879, James Murray, a leading member of the British Philological Society who edited the first edition of the O.E.D., put out “An Appeal to English Speaking Readers,” asking for volunteers to comb through periodicals, pamphlets, works of literature, and scientific and philosophical treatises, and note down unusual words and to quote the sentences in which they appeared. “Anyone can help,” Murray wrote, “especially with modern books.” Readers took down their findings on six-by-four index cards—called “slips”—and submitted them to the dictionary’s editors. Over a million quotations were collected before the publication of the dictionary’s first installment. (The practice has continued, with a few lapses, since then—now it exists in digital form.) According to the O.E.D.’s Web site, “The quotations are one of the most important aspects of the entries contained in the OED. They document the history of a term from its earliest to its most recent recorded usage.”

Among the project’s participants were historians and scholars, but many of the most prolific word-scavengers were laypeople consumed, apparently, by a fiery curiosity about the English language. Martin mentioned one William Chester Minor, a physician who suffered from mental illness and was incarcerated in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, who submitted a huge number of slips (he’s the subject of Simon Winchester’s book “The Professor and the Mad Man”). “A slight amount of insanity might be a good thing for the practice of lexicography,” Martin told me. Think of encountering the word “revirginize” for the first time sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, when the project was in its heyday. You couldn’t go to Google books to find other instances of it. You had to search obsessively—through libraries, newspapers, goodness knows where else—for other examples of the word. “The level of work required…it’s an insane undertaking,” Martin said. Another insane—I use the word colloquially—fact: Minor is a distant cousin of Martin’s “Like to think I’m carrying on a tradition,” she said with a laugh.

Every entry in the O.E.D. shows the full history of a word as far back as the editors can trace it. The dictionary is currently undergoing its first comprehensive revision since the first edition was completed in 1928; its staff of over seventy editors adds new sources to reflect contemporary usage, and its smaller team of bibliographers checks every citation for accuracy. But when Veronica Hurst, the O.E.D.’s chief bibliographer recently encountered the slip for “revirginize” and saw “The Meanderings of Memory” quoted as the first source for the word’s appearance in 1852 (“Where that cosmetic…Shall e’er revirginize that brow’s abuse,” the listing says), she tried to locate the book. All she could find was the one little mention in a bookseller’s catalog from 1854.

It’s unusual for there to be such scant evidence for the existence of a source in the first edition. Furthermore, the O.E.D.’s team of bibliographers--they are the unsung heroes of the O.E.D., according to Martin--are intimately familiar with the handwritings of the champion slip-writers, and Hurst did not recognize the writing on the slip for “revirginize” that made mention of “Meanderings of Memory.” This book is cited forty-eight other times—a high number of citations for an obscure work.

I asked Martin if she had a pet theory about who wrote the book and whether it even existed: Would someone have made up a source for forty-nine different words? Martin thinks that the tiny entry in the bookseller’s catalog is evidence that the book is out there somewhere. She suspects it may have been a vanity project—self-published, narrowly distributed—that sold badly. Maybe the writer of the slips citing “Meanderings” was the author of the book! “Here is a book that everyone has forgotten,” Martin said, “but it is immortal. It is in the O.E.D.” A clever bid for a footnote in posterity.

“Meanderings of Memory” may be sitting, neglected, on some library shelf (many library books that have not been requested for check out by patrons for years have not been digitized). Will the book’s fate be discovered? No leads yet, Martin said. “I’m hoping some inspired librarian will crack the case.” A moment later, she corrected herself, wanting to be more precise “some intrepid librarian, I meant.”

Illustration by Philippe Weisbecker.

This post has been updated to reflect clarifications about the number of editors and bibliographers at the O.E.D. and how they go about revising the dictionary.