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At one point, Murray opened a bag only to find a family of live mice chewing on the paperwork. In 1879, the entire letter H turned up in Italy. Slips for the letter G were nearly burned with somebody’s trash. Words beginning with Pa went missing for 12 years, only to be recovered in County Cavan, Ireland, where somebody was using the papers as kindling. Some papers were stuffed haphazardly into boxes or bags, where they gathered cobwebs and were forgotten. With thousands of slips pouring into the OED’s offices every day, things could often go wrong.
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The process helped Oxford’s editors study all of the shades of meaning expressed by a single word, but it was also tedious and messy. Volunteers would copy that sentence and mail it to Oxford’s editors, who would review it and compare the slip to others to highlight the word illuminate.) (For example, the previous sentence might be a good example of the word illuminate. Every day, volunteers mailed in thousands of small strips of paper called “quotation slips.” On these slips, volunteers would copy a single sentence from a book, in hopes that this sentence could help illuminate a particular word’s meaning. The irony of making this massive reference book was that it required millions upon millions of tiny, tiny pieces of paper. When James Murray took command in 1879, the Oxford English Dictionary could best be defined by the word disarray. Before the first volume-an installment consisting of words beginning with the letters A and B-was published in 1888, multiple editors had taken (and abandoned) the helm, and each regime change created new opportunities for mayhem. Looking back, it’s impressive that more words were not lost. But in the eyes of its editor James Murray, the very first volume of the dictionary was something of an embarrassment: It was missing a word. In total, the project took seven decades to catalogue everything from A to Z, defining a total of 414,825 words. When the complete edition of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary debuted in 1928, it was lauded as a comprehensive collection of the English language, a glossary so vast-and so thorough-that no other reference book could ever exceed its detail or depth.