Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806. His 1828 follow-up contained 70,000 entries. By 1864, the collection had 114,000 ...
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, by Sarah Ogilvie (Knopf, 370 pp., $30) Recently, I had a friend to lunch in New York and when I showed him my study, ...