Chatto & Windus signs Ogilvie’s ‘untold story' of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Dictionary People – described as “the people’s history of the first great crowdsourcing experiment of the Victorian age, the Oxford English Dictionary” – by lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie, has gone to Chatto & Windus.

Clara Farmer, publishing director, acquired rights in UK and Commonwealth from Rebecca Carter when she was at Janklow & Nesbit. Chatto & Windus will publish The Dictionary People in hardback on 7th September 2023. US and Canadian rights are held by Knopf, Penguin Random House US; translation rights are being handled by PFD.

The synopsis reads: “What do three murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T.

“But the Dictionary didn’t just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians.”

In the book, Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of the OED, the publisher continues: “She traces the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language, from the eccentric autodidacts to the family groups who made word-collection their passion.

“Ogilvie reveals, for the first time, the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world – and celebrates to sparkling effect the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People.”

Farmer said: “In 26 scintillating chapters, Sarah Ogilvie tells the untold story of the misfits and outsiders who helped make the OED. Ogilvie is uniquely placed to bring her cast of thousands to life and provide a fresh way of thinking about an eminent Victorian institution. In this lively, sometimes alarming and ever-charming people’s history, she shows just why their words matter. It’s not just history: if the ecstatic reaction at Vintage is anything to go by, today’s word-nerds are going to love this book!”

Ogilvie teaches at the University of Oxford, and specialises in language, dictionaries and technology. As a lexicographer she has been an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and was chief editor of Oxford Dictionaries in Australia. As a technologist she has worked in Silicon Valley at Lab 126, Amazon’s innovation lab, where she was part of the team that developed the Kindle. She said: “It is a great pleasure and honour to work with the fantastic Clara Farmer and her wonderful team at Chatto & Windus. I am so delighted that they too love the Dictionary People and their words.”