Surprisingly, the American author who is quoted most in the OED isnot Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, but rather EdwardH. Knight, a patent lawyer and expert in mechanics who wrote the AmericanMechanical Dictionary and The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics. Knight isthe seventy-fourth-most cited author in the Dictionary, quoted morefrequently than Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot or Ralph Waldo Emerson(who comes in at 116, the next-most quoted American).

Those times are better captured in the ten volumes, 414,825entries, and 1,827,306 quotations that were finally published in 1928.

Some Americans did write directly to Murray, and these – 196 ofthem – are the ones underlined in the address books. They represent 10 percent of all the Dictionary People with addresses and produced a total of238,080 slips that crossed the ocean before coming to rest on Murray’s deskin the Scriptorium.

Ranking below Thomas Austin, who sent in 165,061 slips, and WilliamDouglas, who sent in 151,982, there is a big drop to the third-highestcontributor Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield, who sent in 70,277 slips.

And yet he desperately needed the help of Subeditors because the task wastoo massive to do alone. Two years into the job, Murray had estimated thathe had sent out 817,625 blank slips to Readers. If they returned them withquotations, and if he spent a minimum of 30 seconds reading each one andallocating it to the correct sense of an entry, it would take him three workingyears to get through a third of the materials gathered.

Murray received a poignant letter in 1906 fromthe wife of William Sykes of South Devon who had been a one-timeassistant, and faithful Reader and Specialist for twenty-two years, sending in atotal of 16,048 slips: ‘My dear husband died last Friday, the day he receivedyour letter, he was able to read it, and wrote your name in one of the books Iam going to send you eight hours before he died. It took him an hour to writeit, but he made up his mind to do it, and did. The last words he ever wrotewere to you.’ A poignant last line from the impoverished widow reads, ‘I shallsend the books when the probate duty has been paid.’

From the moment in March 1879 whenMurray signed the contract with Oxford University Press to be the next Editorof the Dictionary, and he took possession of 2 tons of slips at his house, hisfamily was immediately part of the project (whether they liked it or not)sorting out the slips. Their house was a workplace and the family aworkforce.

The most prolific Reader in Europe – we might call him a ‘super-contributor’ – was Hartwig Helwich, a professor at the University of Viennawho wrote out the entire Cursor Mundi onto 46,599 slips. His efforts madethe medieval poem the second-most-frequently cited work in the Dictionaryafter the Bible (though in the current OED, it has dropped to eleventh in thetop sources).