Liddell and Scott and the Oxford English Dictionary

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It considers the claim of language sciences historian Hans Aarsleff that the lexicography of the OED depends entirely on Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. The story of the relationship between Liddell and Scott and the OED, which was to be published as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED) and then came to be known from the 1890s onwards as the OED falls into three parts. The first concerns the place of Liddell and Scott in the thought of the founders of the NED/OED project in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The second concerns the Lexicon’s place in the thought and practice of the founding editor of the printed dictionary, James Murray, from the late 1870s onwards. The third concerns the relationship between editions of Liddell and Scott and of the OED in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.