When Marsh sent out his appeal for American Readers, what wasknown as the ‘Dictionary War’ had been waging for some time between twoleading lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. Worcester hadbeen Webster’s assistant on his American Dictionary of the English Language(1828) but, a superior philologist to Webster,

Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm were also lexicographerswho created and edited the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent ofthe OED. Or rather I should say, the OED is the English equivalent of theDeutsches Wörterbuch, because the German dictionary was started first (evenif it ended up being finished later because the Brothers Grimm died beforethe letter G, and it took another hundred years to complete).

a fellowlexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, hadhis own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with WilliamHenley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing theletters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took hispublisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jurythat writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personallyguilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs.Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Actby arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, notthe public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henleywas published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck andmany other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and thepublic outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

Lexicographers often show more credulity in positing origins of phrases than they ever would in reporting the etymologies of individual words.

lexicographers (lexicographi) collated ‘namesin different languages’, while nomenclators (nomenclatores) concentrated on naming the objectsof natural history.