Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Jane Austen letter
Guide to fashion and etiquette
Alphabet books
Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
Jane Austen, Persuasion
P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Grammar for children
Yorkshire dialect
Punctuation for children
Anti-slavery poem
Diary description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Modern Flash Dictionary
Dickens, Oliver Twist
London dialect in Dickens
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Lear's Book of Nonsense
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
The Communist Manifesto
'How do I love thee?'
Poverty and the workhouse
Poor Letter H
'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
Get your ‘air cut!
Cookery for the poor
Mary Seacole's autobiography
Mary Seacole newspaper article
Nursery rhymes
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
The Woman in White
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Christmas
Melodrama: East Lynne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Queen's English
Letter from Charles Darwin
Text message poetry
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Music Hall
Victorian fashion
Freakshow posters
Street sellers
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
Oxford English Dictionary
Afrikaans novel
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Anglo-Indian dictionary
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Circus poster
Jack the Ripper murders
Match Girls Strike
Babu English
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
H G Wells, The Time Machine
English 'down under'
In 1879 an agreement was reached with Oxford University Press to begin work on a revolutionary New English Dictionary. The plan was to create a vast and comprehensive collection of English words, those from the Early Middle English period (1150) onwards, a lexicon of the language more complete than any English dictionary-maker had ever attempted. The dictionary would include lost and outmoded words as well as the newest fashionable or technical terms; it would trace the history (or etymology) of every word, showing the earliest known usage of each word, and would map how the word had shifted in meaning over time; and it would search through a whole range of texts, taking its quotations from sources previously thought to be insignificant such as song lyrics or slang. Fifty years later the first version of the dictionary - 178 miles of type - was published.
The dictionary's editor, James Murray, appealed to readers around the English speaking world to get involved. Eventually hundreds of volunteers were working as word detectives, scouring historical and contemporary texts to collect evidence for as many words as possible. They rummaged through literature (popular and classic), newspapers, specialist scientific or technological journals, song sheets, theatre scripts, recipe books, wills, and political documents, collecting a myriad of words and meanings. The readers sent millions of quotations to Murray, which were then checked, sorted and filed by his team of editors. The archive box shown here contains quotations for words beginning with the letter M in the range miler to mischief.
Archive box of quotation slips, late 19th/early 20th century.
On loan from Oxford University Press Archives.