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    The Meaning of Everything
    The Meaning of Everything
    The Meaning of Everything
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Meaning of Everything

    Written by Simon Winchester

    Narrated by Simon Winchester

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. 


    Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--""so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy""--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from ""the irredeemably famous"" Samuel Johnson to the ""short, pale, smug and boastful"" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making--how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated--and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium--the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it--and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption.


    The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project--a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled uber-dictionary.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 13, 2004
    ISBN9780060744038
    The Meaning of Everything
    Author

    Simon Winchester

    Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for The Meaning of Everything

    4/5

    521 ratings32 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Simon Winchester's masterful handling brings this fool's quest, the OED, to life. This is the sort of monumental task that his hard to imagine in the present age of computers. Thousands of words, millions of quotations from literature. All adding up to several tons of paper and ink; all waiting to be read, sorted, categorized and immortalize. The mind boggles. An absolutely fascinating read.
    • 4/5
      Read this for library school. Actually enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      Another winner from Simon Winchester: this is an in-depth look at the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and in common with his other books, it's written in a pleasingly chatty style with a wealth of amusing footnotes. In many cases, the footnotes can be more interesting that the material to which it's appended! Which is no insult to the main body of the text, since you get a very good idea of the trials and tribulations involved in this landmark project. Unlike Erik Larson, Winchester spices his books with liberal doses of illustrations, and in these cases, they're quite illuminating, especially the "quotation slips" and the photographs. Highly recommended. (Amusingly, this edition is from the Oxford University Press.)
    • 4/5
      A great telling of the story of the development of the Oxford English Dictionary and the people who created it.
    • 4/5
      Who would have thought that the producing of a dictionary would be so fascinating?Winchester gives us the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be and the marvelous array of eccentrics involved in its creation and the ongoing work leading to the final release of the OED, some decades later than first expected.In between we read of surgeons in mental hospitals, the encouragement of women's sculling, philology and words going missing for many years. And the word which went missing for many years.
    • 5/5
      from the Things bookbox last round. I liked this better than The Professor and the Madman. I click on the OED all the time on my kindle and never noticed the nuances in the descriptions. Great book
    • 4/5
      Without the same sense of impending menace in THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN -the 'Oh my God, don't! Please just don't do it!' -The Meaning of Everything is rewarding for the erudite presentation of Winchester'sexhaustive study of the eventual creation of the OED.How one may wish to join the men - to sit beside Herbert Coleridge and listento his considerations, to hear Richard Chenevix Trench's critical speechfuming that the existing dictionaries were simply not good enough, to hear ALL of James Murray's reactions to the developments,and to go boating with Frederick Furnivall!The lesser than five stars relates to Winchester's strangeoveruse of "niggardly," as well as his bizarre insertionof the n-word as a footnote.He knows the immediate negative impact...so why...?
    • 4/5
      Interesting story of the history of the OED. Not exactly a page turner, but it contained some interesting tidbits about the origin and meaning of some esoteric words, and especially about the perseverance of its many creators.
    • 4/5
      A bit slow to start when it was going over the history of English (read it many times elsewhere) but then a fascinating story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and the larger than life characters who were involved in its creation.
    • 5/5
      This is an entertaining history of the OED, suitable for anyone who loves dictionaries. The best parts are the anecdotal stories about the politics and the quirky behavior of the people involved in the creation of the dictionary. Details about words and their derivations are merely incidental to the story of the dictionary itself -- as it should be.
    • 4/5
      The Professor and the Madman (called the Surgeon of Crowthorne in England) gave some exposure to the gargantuan task involved in preparing the Oxford English Dictionary but this book really takes the lid off. Having grown up with ready access to dictionaries I never really thought about how life would be without them. I certainly never thought about how one would go about the task of preparing one virtually from scratch. The amount ot time it took to publish the first installment (A to Ant.) from the date a comprehensive dictionary was first proposed was 27 years. The first installment appeared in 1884 but the dictionary in its entirety was not available until 1928. James A. H. Murray who was the editor of that first fascicle (as the installments were called) did not live to see the dictionary completed, nor did many of the other people involved in the task. The infamous Surgeon of Crowthorne died back in the US thanks to efforts by James Murray. One printer, James Gilbert, worked on printing the entire dictionary--certainly a life's work.Winchester does a good job of portraying the characters involved in this task. James Murray, in particular, comes to life on these pages. He also manages to convey the enormity of the task without resorting to a dull recitation of dates and figures. My one quibble with his writing is his habit of writing sentences with many phrases. More than once I had to re-read something in order to figure out how the ending fit with the beginning. For that reason I have downgraded the rating from 8 to 7.Still, if you have a fascination for words, you will find this book enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      The Meaning of Everything covers the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, from the proposal in 1857 to the Philological Society, to the publication of the first fascicle in 1884, to the last volume of the original edition in 1928, with an epilogue touching on the updates that the OED was working on when the book was published, in 2003. There were many people who worked on the dictionary, so there are many small biographies tucked into the main story. Winchester scatters humorous anecdotes around in footnotes (e.g. "He was powerfully attracted to rough, strong, dirty women, and he married his own servant, Hannah Cullick, delighting in her covering herself with dirt and soot, as, perfectly willingly, she cleaned the household chimneys entirely naked." [p. 63]) and often refers to people by their eccentricities, rather than their role with the dictionary (an early assistant turns out to be a kleptomaniac, which Winchester mentions several times).At the end, Winchester writes that "this story is not supposed to be overtly hagiographical" [p. 235], which is a good summary. At times it is difficult to discern whether he is echoing that turn of the century enthusiasm for the Forward March of Progress! or whether he himself is just really enthusiastic about the subject. Perhaps both are true. The book is certainly reverential, regardless of its supposed intent to not be overtly hagiographical.
    • 4/5
      While I didn't find "The Meaning of Everything" as fascinating as Simon Winchester's earlier work, "The Professor and the Madman" which covered a fraction of the scope of this book, it is a wonderful history of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The incredible persistence and high standards of the many who worked on the original dictionary over 70 years is an object lesson in scholarship.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating story behind my dream dictionary. The labor it took to create the OED out of whole cloth took multiple lifetimes. This book, while thorough and enjoyable, still leaves much untold. I want more.
    • 3/5
      Whilst this was an interesting book it wasn't the most entertaining. I've seen other reviews say they found it funny but I couldn't really find anything humourous apart from a couple quotes. For a short book it drags a little in parts but overall it is a worthwhile read into an amazing endeavour in the the preservation of the English language.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of The Oxford English Dictionary and how it came to be. Simon Winchester does a good job at telling the story -- and it is a story, as opposed to a history. He includes some footnotes, but it would never be confused with an in-depth history of the OED. The focus is on the early years, when the project was getting started, and not the newest edition, including the electronic version. I do wish he would have spent more pages on the problems of the latest electronic version, because it has to have it's own set of challenges. One major drawback from reading this book is now I want to buy the OED.
    • 4/5
      I hate to admit this, but I didn't care for The Meaning of Everything. Okay, while I'm being honest I'll go for broke - I didn't get beyond page 19. There. I said it. I was bored. As a person deeply connected to reading you would think I would be intimate with words, especially the origin of words. I mean, words form sentences and sentences form paragraphs and paragraphs form pages and pages fill books, right? And books are what it's all about, right? No. I guess the bottom line is I don't care about where the word came from. The word, when it stands alone, is boring. How sad is that? I need words strung together into sentences. Those sentences need to be woven together to ultimately make a story interesting. This, however, was not.
    • 4/5
      Just makes me want to own my own edition of the OED. Like right now. Lovely Simon Winchester!
    • 4/5
      The OED is an incredible achievement and Winchester lays out the history well. Especially elucidating are the explanations and analysis of the volunteer effort which is the backbone of the OED, an army of amateurs volunteers around the globe who spent an unspeakable amount of time researching the history of common words as well as such words as depone, erinaceous and floccinaucinihilipilification. I think it is this emphasis on etymology, on historical and contextual use, which is especially important; there is no official Academy of English language, no linguistic metropole or arbitrator, and so therefore all meaning is to be found in situ (i.e., descriptive rather prescriptive).
    • 5/5
      Simon Winchester has done a great job of drawing out the human stories behind the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary: the problems getting the project of the ground, the personal feuds, the huge amount of effort involved in keeping it going and in bringing it to completion.There's plenty of humour in the book and a sizeable scattering of interesting lexicographical titbits from the work itself. A fascinating, accessible read.
    • 2/5
      After doing nigh on 400 of these LibraryThing reviews (I’m gunning for you, bluetyson!), I’m starting to recognize a few of the warning signs that a book is gonna be silly tripe. “Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times”, unfortunately, is one (what is up with these people and the books they make bestsellers? Why can’t they just stick to TV?). Being about language and written by a non-academic, twice as unfortunately, is another (Mark Liberman is right:linguists are doing a bad, bad job inculcating a basic knowledge of the discipline in the general public, similar to what they have in chemistry, for example, and we need a required course in linguistics at the high school level, or popular books about language are going to remain the province of bullshit merchants like Bill Bryson).

      But the most telling sign of all comes when I start reading and folding over pages—as I do—when I find something notable, whether it’s a beautiful passage or a pithy epigraph or something that I expect to be of use in my research or something that’s just silly and laughable. As the pages fold, a good/evil ratio starts to emerge, and most books find themselves firmly on one side of it. Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary chooses the wrong side.

      It’s, well, “criminal” is a strong word, but surely at least a misdemeanor or venial sin to have a story as full of intrinsic interest as this one fall into your lap and make such a sow’s ear out of it. Winchester comes off both stupid and repulsive, with his pandering and sniggering and constant dweebish insistence on embracing a sort of cod-version of the idiom and attitudes of the era about which he is writing. (In addition to my main tags, which note the date I finish reading a book, I have started including secondary tags when books fall into what I once dubbed “serial autoecholalia”, when an author obviously, partway through writing a work, suddenly remembered or learned a particular word existed, was taken with it, and proceeds to throw it in willy-nilly for a while, before getting bored or embarrassed and letting it drop again. In this book that word is “martinet”. Everyone’s a “martinet” as long as they disagree with James Murray (the august editor of the early OED), and then we get to see how they were just grumpy or whatever and still have inner humanity when they get over themselves and come in on the side of manifest lexicographical destiny.) It’s all, and this isn’t a real quote, “Mr. Dickon Hulme, Esq., of Thistlebottom Lane, North Glumwich, contributed definitions of numerous words concerned with the Orient, whose mysteries he had penetrated during his sojourn in Kashmir with the 21st Coldpuddle Rifles.” You can’t fool us, Simon Winchester. Books have publication dates, right inside the front cover for everyone to see. AND YOURS IS 2003.

      You get the idea—the epic tale of the greatest book ever, mostly ruined by Winchester’s dumbdowningness and creepy Victorianophilia (if he doesn’t vote BNP, it’s because he’ll die a Tory like his dear old dad, and if he does, it’s because Cameron will bend over for the Europeans and blackfellows. That’s actually way harsh, and I disavow it immediately after having said it, but it’s the feeling you get.) There are great moments, like learning that South Africa had its own equivalent of the Academie Francaise (it would) or just how many of the OED’s contributors were in asylums or jail (all of ‘em!), but they’re just a little bit too compromised by weird Colonel Blimp moves, fetishization of English as qualitatively superior to other languages, total lack (as the fetishization thing perhaps implies) of linguistic knowledge, total lack of respect for his audience, and all-around assiness.

    • 4/5
      While it appears that the networks of the Web have lead to revolutionary progressions of information sharing, we must recognize the contributions of people who have been a part of endeavors without the current technologies. Winchester traces the long history of Oxford English Dictionary and the contributive efforts of volunteer readers in The Meaning of Everything. Without monetary gains, volunteers sent in their slips of illustrative uses of words to the Scriptorium. Here was a network, though inhibited by the slow pace at the time of publishing and the post, which succeeded because most involved, shared a desire to contribute.
    • 4/5
      A great companion piece to The Professor and the Madman, providing a further glimpse into the history and people that brought to fruition the Oxford English Dictionary. Winchester has a way of making history vital - bringing the human dimension to the fore. This book makes one wish time was available to be a volunteer reader, providing illustrative quotations which bring to life the history and evolution of words in the English language. It is too much to ask that some day I might own a copy of the multi-volume lexicography, but even if I did, would I have time to fully relish the bounty within?
    • 4/5
      A very readable book on the story of the Oxford English Dictionary, how it came to be, and the main characters in the development of the book, including the Civil War surgeon W. C. Minor, who was a prisoner in England's Bedlam Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
    • 5/5
      This fairly slim volume packs in tons of information about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, a massive undertaking begun in the 1850s, the first edition of which was not completed until 1928, and under revision for a 3rd edition today. Though sometimes getting bogged down in details, this is an overall fascinating account of the dictionary, from the recognition of a need for one to the ongoing revisions necessary as the English language continues to change.Winchester's love for words and the OED comes through in his prose riddled with words (fittingly enough) that will expand your vocabulary -- "gallimaufry," "polymathic," and "oleaginous" to name a few. Furthermore, his research shines through as one gets the sense that he's telling only a fraction of the stories he could. Even as I learned more about the history of the OED and came away with an appreciation of the impossible size of the project, my interest in learning more was whetted.
    • 4/5
      interesting account of the 70 year making of the monumental OED, the methodology, struggles, editors, volunteers. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      Simon Winchester is one of the more popular non-fiction authors of our time and this is one of the books upon which he made his reputation. While apparently a rather small book, it deals in quite fascinating detail with the origins and development of the OED. While it does discuss how the OED was researched and how it's now legendary format and incredible amount of detail was developed, the book's primary focus is on the personalities that helped (or hindered) the gestation and birth of the OED. As usual Winchester is a master of story telling in his rather unique way. For those who are not very familiar with English tradition and culture, some causal references made by Winchester might be obscure and puzzling, but those willing to put in the time doing some Google research will be enlightened and entertained. Very much recommended as a good casual read.
    • 2/5
      You really have to be into the English language and the history thereof to be entertained by this, which I'm not. Oh well, it was okay, well written, just not that interesting to me.
    • 3/5
      The epic history of the creation of the vast Oxford English Dictionary.This book is absorbing even if you have already read Simon Winchester's prequel, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, the story of one of the OED's major contributors. (The S of C is called something else in the US.)Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the OED is its democratic conception. Without an army of unpaid contributors offering their research unpaid, often for decades, the OED would not exist. One wonders not that one person could devote so much selfless effort for the love of words, but that so many such people exist.Another fascinating aspect of the story is the sheer logistical challenge of collating and sifting so much material in the age of the inkwell. One sees the 19th century getting to grips with the corporate managerial problems of the 21st century...and not doing a bad job at all!
    • 4/5
      All too often, nonfiction with an interesting premise gets bogged down when the author takes a dry, overly scholarly approach. I'm pleased to report that that isn't at all the case here. Though Winchester's take is decidedly scholarly, he imbues his writing with such obvious enthusiasm for the subject matter that the book is a pure delight to read. I enjoyed every page and found myself rushing to my dictionary as soon as I was done, eager to examine just how it was put together.