CAUGHT IN THE WEB OF WORDS: JAMES A.H. MURRAY AND THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY by K.M. Elisabeth Murray Yale University Press; 386 pages; $15
With its splendid hoard of half a million words, the Oxford English Dictionary is the central bank of the language a trove of Latinate abstractions. Old Frisian or Old French oddments, fubsy eloquences of Middle English and exotic intrusions from the Arabic. It contains a million and a half quotations to show the historical progress of language, the way its vocabularies have stirred, matured in meaning and eventually decayed....
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