The Dictionary
Sunday December 02, 2012
I commute to Chicago every day on the Metra. At the station is a book rack that the local library keeps filled with books. "Take one, Leave one" it says. I have borrowed several, from The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets to Dark Roots. The one that caught my eye most recently was The Professor and the Madman: A tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford Dictionary. The madman was Dr. W. C. Minor, who contributed on the order of 10,000 items to the dictionary. Unbeknownst to the editor of the dictionary Dr. J.A.H. Murray, Minor was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. Two particular acts stand out. One was the murder of an innocent man. The second was an autopeotomy.
A bit of online browsing led me to the history of the dictionary, which was certainly a monumental effort, spanning 70 years before its first publication. When it came time to produce an electronic version, the University of Waterloo began this effort in 1985. As with any dictionary, the typesetting of the OED was a very complex task. The electronic effort used a language called SGML which means Standard Generalized Markup Language. This markup language indicates bold, italic, special characters by means of alphabetic symbols enclosed in angle brackets and a few other special symbols. A picture of what one definition marked up is shown here. SGML was used as a model for today's markup language--called HTML--used throught all of the web.
The manager of the product at Waterloo, which was a tour de force of technology was Tim Bray. Tim went on to form Open Text Corporation, which used the search engine that was part of the electronic version of the OED. While there, he wrote one of the first web search engines. In a past life, I worked at a company that built publishing systems based on SGML, and had the opportunity to meet Tim.
He now works at Google and lives in Vancouver. His blog is a mixture of photographs, notes on technology, and occasionally opinions on the world scene.
You can see a sample word under the section titled Word of the Day.