The 1911 “Concise Oxford Dictionary” (COD) is the first edition of the dictionary I use, the “Concise Oxford English Dictionary” (COED), now on its 12th edition a hundred years later. It is the desk dictionary version of the much larger “Oxford English Dictionary” (OED). Where the OED was 15,940 pages long, the COD was only 1,064. Thus the word “concise”.
Oxford University Press wanted to pack as much of the OED as they could into a single volume, one that an ordinary person could buy for a few shillings.
Current English: Where the OED set out to be a description of all recorded English since the Norman Invasion, the COD concerned itself only with “current” English, the sort an educated person in southern England would come across day to day in 1911. In effect it more or less came down to the words most commonly used by the London newspapers and the King James Bible, then still commonly read and heard at church.
Enter the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., they who would later give us Fowler’s guide to English usage. At the time they were living in two cottages on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. Oxford would send out the materials they needed and they would send back completed pages on deadline. It took them only five years, from 1906 to 1911. It literally was a “dictionary written by White people.”
The OED was incomplete when they began. It was only up to M. But Oxford already had more than enough material to get up to Z. The COD was completed 17 years before the OED, the book it was based on.
The first five editions were mainly the work of one or two people working from home with a typewriter. In the 1970s they brought it in house. In the 1980s they began to computerize everything.
Then and now: the 1911 and 2011 editions compared:
- Length: from 1,064 pages to 1,682.
- Price: 3s 6d (21 grams of silver or 0.7 crowns) to $24.75 (48 g or 1.6 crowns).
- Words added: computer, radio, television, cinema, Internet, tweet (of any kind), homosexual, etc.
- Words removed: autocar, teleseme, cockyolly bird, impaludism, etc.
- Spellings still current in 1911: shew, to-day, rime, connexion, oecology, socker, negro (not capitalized), rôle (still italicized with the French ô), etc.
- Words in 1911:
- revolution – not mainly political.
- pudding – not mainly sweet.
- trench – not mainly military.
- cleavage – not yet said of breasts.
- lamp – mainly gaslit, not electric.
- neon – a newly discovered gas, not yet used for bright city lights.
- American – still “of European descent”.
- Lesbian – from the island of Lesbos, though there was the “Lesbian vice”.
- gay – mirthful, not homosexual (itself a new word from 1892 that did not appear in the 1911 COD).
- sex – something you were (male, female, hermaphrodite), not something you “had”.
- love – “warm” affection in its main sense, not yet “deep” affection.
- passenger pigeon – still one at the Cincinnati Zoo.
But maybe the biggest change is that although I have a print edition, I mainly use the computer program that came with it to look up words.
– Abagond, 2017.
See also:
- Archive.org: the 1911 COD
- dictionary
- Fowler’s
- H.G. Wells English
- King James Bible
- The 1900 House – life in London in 1900
- The term “Negro”
- Black people according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
587
I have no idea what happened to it but I used to have a copy of that red covered OCD… Would be so interesting to look through it now.
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Abagond being the Anglophile that he is this post is fitting.
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Dictionaries really are written by White people.
The logical conclusion to the “scientific racism” of the 1800s.
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Wow! Just glanced that 1911 definition of Negro. The British were colonizers and that is the lens they viewed black African people.
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@Afrofem
Dictionaries really are written by White people.
Like most things. Who writes/films and generally “expertizes” and salivates on say, the wildlife of Africa and South America, for example?
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That 1911 definition of Negro might as well be saying animal, not human. This is where Eugenics and race science come into play. Black skinned, flat nose, woolly hair, thick lipped etc. Then ithe definition goes into stereotypes, minstrels, singing, dances. The word inferior is also thrown in with a host of other ugly names. Such is the mind of colonizers and oppressors of that time period.
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“Dictionaries really are written by white people.” Yes, Afrofem i concur.
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@ Joe
“Who writes/films and generally “expertizes” and salivates on say, the wildlife of Africa and South America…?”
True. You would never know there were intelligent human beings living in those locales from books, magazine articles, websites and films produced by educated White people. That was especially true in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Not much has changed these days. They talk/write a better game, but still play the same old games.
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@ Mary Burrell
I noticed the word “inferior” dropped into the third definition also. It was describing a product, but still close to the definitions of a group of people..
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I added to the post:
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I also added a picture of H.W. Fowler.
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With definitions like that it must have been an actual belief. incredible. I used to have a lot of old books from Grandparents which have gone now. One Victorian(I think cookery) had an advert in it for Pears soap; In the 1st picture a lady put a black baby in a tub and washed him with Pears soap, in the second picture the same baby came out of the tub white! I remembered it reading this blog and thinking about that dictionary which I once owned.
I have to say tho, I love the English language – it has its roots in languages from all over the world which have culminated into what we speak today, I think it is lyrical and clever. I love the way it is constantly evolving and changing, all the new words and definitions which are added to the Oxford dictionary every year. Living in London which is crowded and cosmopolitan it is fascinating to hear how people create fusions from their mother tongues and English to create whole new words which then become common lingo ( Is this agglutinative language?)
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@ Abagond
Not only was it written by White people, it was also written for White people to make sense of the world around them.
People of African descent were just part of the wildlife and scenery———-like the ants, bats and monkeys mentioned in the definition.
It reminds me of the way Black folk are portrayed in contemporary Hollywood movies. Black people are still mere backdrops, local color and easily recognized stereotypes: no agency, depth, intelligence or pain.
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Is it possible to have a Dictionary of the English language that is not “written by white people” or “written for white people” (I am not talking about a dictionary for language learners, plenty of which I have seen in other languages.). Does one exist already? Do we need one?
To be sure, English is used in many countries and sovereign states where white people are few. What kind of dictionary should they be using?
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“…English is used in many countries and sovereign states where white people are few. What kind of dictionary should they be using?”
Not the 1911 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary that is under discussion on this thread.
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How about moving away from English and other European languages and tackling an African one like N’Ko? Never heard of it huh, too busy worrying about what whites think of you? It was invented or reinvented, if Rodney Salnave is right, by Soulemayne Kante in 1949. R. Salnave speculated, based on the testimony of a Colonel Malenfant that a slave named Tamerlan had told him he could read and write a language that wasn’t Arabic after he caught Tamerlan trying to decipher his mail. He asked Tamerlan to write something in his language. Malenfant lost Tamerlan’s writing but recalled, several decades later that, like Arabic, it was written from right to left and that the name of the language, as written by Tamerlan, began with a letter that looked like a “g” and ended with one that looked like an “o”. The Wikipedia page speculates: “Literate and a former priest in his home country, Tamerlan wrote down the name of his writing in 3 letters that Haitian researcher Rodney Salnave judged to be N’Ko. If this writing was indeed N’ko, it would imply that the N’ko writing was at the very least two centuries older than believed and that Souleymane Kante did not create the N’Ko alphabet in 1949 ; he only revived it from files that his family brought from hometown Segou,[5] Mali. If this is the case, the original inventor of N’ko may have been future Bambara king Ngolo Diarra, who, in his youth, studied in Timbuktu, Mali, in early 1700’s, but not as a Muslim, rather as an animist who became priest[6] to Biton Mamari Coulibaly, founding King of the Ségou Bambara Empire.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_alphabet#The_literary_language
R. Salnave’s fascinating article can be found here. http://bwakayiman.blogspot.ca/2017/02/tamerlan-wasnt-muslim.html
Sorry for the interruption. Now, back to our original programing.
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@ gro jo
That BWA KAY “IL-MENT article was pretty fascinating. Thanks.
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Oxford University Press has also produced the Scofield Bible which is not every body’s cup of tea!
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Afrofem, I knew that a discerning lady like you would appreciate it. What did you think of his argument, did you find it convincing? By the way, there’s a bilingual joke in the title of that blog: “BWA Kay” (WOOD House)[in Creole] “IL-MENT” ( HE IS LYING) [in French].
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There are those amazing Southern and Eastern African click languages which have no written record. Many are soon to be lost or already extinct.
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@ gro jo
I wrote a response to your comment on the Open Thread:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/open-thread/comment-page-1/#comment-376339
Trying not to derail this thread….
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I have a copy of the first print version dated June, 1911. Do Anybody has any idea as to how much is it worth?
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@ touristinindia
You might want to try looking up current prices of first editions on Amazon.
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