Unsung heroes

I am used to the Women’s Prize for Fiction finding me a few gems that I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed, but now the new Women's Prize for Non-Fiction is doing the same. When the Longlist of 16 books was announced, I chose two that appealed to me and what good choices I made - this is one of them.

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie

The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary

James Murray was the main editor of the Dictionary, although he died before it was finished in 1928, but he relied on thousands of people, almost all volunteers, who spent many hours providing word entries. They worked on their own, extracting words from books and papers and completing slips of paper on which they recorded the words with their contexts. These contributions, this crowdsourcing, is what was used to create the Dictionary. 

The people were from all walks of life, some quite surprising, and from all over the world. Sarah Ogilvie, a lexicographer herself, found by chance archived lists of these people. She researched them and their lives and that’s what this book is about. It is fascinating and I loved it.