A History of English Language

A history of the english language 322
Frederick James Furnivall
Sir James A.H.Murray
Henry Bradley
Sir William A.Craigie
C.T.Onions
(see § 234)
of the existing dictionaries of the English language began to be acutely felt. Those of
Johnson and Richardson, even in their later revisions, were sadly incomplete and far
below the standards of modern scholarship. In 1857 at a meeting of the Philological
Society in London a committee was appointed to collect words not in the dictionaries,
with a view to publishing a supplement to them. The committee consisted of Herbert
Coleridge, Dean Trench (whose little books English Past and Present and The Study of
Words had shown his interest in word history), and F.J.Furnivall, that great student and
inspirer of students of early English literature. Furnivall seems to have suggested the
undertaking. The most important outcome of the committee’s activity was a paper read to
the Society by Dean Trench, “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries.” In it
he laid down the historical principles on which a dictionary should be compiled. As a
result of this paper the society decided that a supplement would not be satisfactory, and in
January 1858 it passed resolutions calling for a new dictionary. A formal “Proposal for
the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society” was issued the
following year. The two principal aims of the new project were to record every word that
could be found in English from about the year 1000 and to exhibit the history of each—
its forms, its various spellings, and all its uses and meanings, past and present. The lastnamed
feature was especially to be shown by a full selection of quotations from the
whole range of English writings. This would of course necessitate the systematic reading
of thousands of texts. A call for volunteers was issued and met with a most gratifying
response. Hundreds of readers not only from England but all over the world began to
send in material. This was the nucleus out of which the future dictionary grew. The
number of contributors increased, and before the last part of the dictionary was published
some six million slips containing quotations had been gathered. An important by-product
of the dictionary enterprise was the founding of a society for the publication of unedited
texts, chiefly from the Middle Ages. It was early apparent that the words from this great
mass of literature could be obtained only with great difficulty as long as much of it
remained in manuscript. In order to provide the machinery for the printing of this
material by subscription, Furnivall founded in 1864 the Early English Text Society.
Through this society more than 400 volumes, chiefly of Middle English texts, have been
published.
The first editor appointed to deal with the mass of material being assembled was
Herbert Coleridge, already mentioned. Upon his sudden death in 1861 at the age of thirtyone,
he was succeeded by Furnivall, then in his thirty-sixth year. For a time work went
forward with reasonable speed, but then it gradually slowed down, partly because of
Furnivall’s increasing