A Celebration of Making Old “Make” New

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July. In the post below Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, compares old and new version of the OED.

As all who visit this site are doubtless aware, the OED is currently being fully revised. As most of you very likely know, this is the first time that a complete overhaul of this work has ever been attempted (past edits have focused on adding words that had been overlooked, or words that had recently gained currency; there has not yet been a top to bottom scrubbing of all the errors). And as some few of you can perhaps guess, this project is an enormous amount of work.

How much work is entailed in revising a dictionary? Never having done this work myself I cannot say for certain, but my guess is that it is almost as much work as writing the dictionary in the first place, and in some ways maybe more. I imagine that this must be somewhat trying for the lexicographers involved, as I do not think that the general public and the press greet a revised edition with the same anticipation and hoopla that they reserve for a brand new work. After all, if people were aware of just how different a specific dictionary becomes after it is revised we would likely not see so many copies of older dictionaries still being used as though they were up to date.

Having some spare time on my hands recently I decided to sit down with the old and the new versions of the OED, and to compare some of what has changed. The first word that I chose to look at was make, which has the singular distinction of having recently usurped set as the word in the OED with the longest entry. I opened two windows on my computer, with make, v.1 from the 1989 in one and the new and improved make in the other. Then I copied and pasted each one into a separate Word document in the vain hope that this would make it easier to compare the two.

The first thing that I noticed was that the new entry is now a daunting 179 pages long when put into a Word file, as opposed to the rather more manageable 99 pages that it was in 1989. The next thing I noticed is that almost everything about it is now substantially different, beginning with the variant forms of the word. Whereas the 1989 version of make listed 76 different forms through the ages, the newer version lists 177.

This may not seem like a very big deal to some people. In fact, it may only seem like a very big deal to a few people out there. It is likely that the percentage of people who own a copy of the OED and use it to check on archaic forms of the word make is very small indeed. But that does not mean that this is not a big deal – it is hugely important, and in one way demonstrates just how lovely a thing the OED is.

If someone came to me and said ‘can you find ten or twelve alternate forms of the word make that have been used by English speakers over the past thousand years?’ I suppose I could, but only by spending an enormous amount of time on it. I shudder to think about how much work must have gone into finding those initial 76 variants, and I shudder even more to think about how much more work must have gone into finding the next 100.

But one of the joys about the OED is the absurd effort they put into finding the answers to questions that will be asked by only a handful of people. Some time after the first edition of the OED was published some editor found that the word we now know as make was on rare occasions written as maacode in Old English, and now this is included in the new edition. I now know this, and whoever is reading this post now knows it as well, and even if this knowledge is ephemeral I like to think that that editor who found that is right now enjoying a moment of quiet satisfaction, knowing that they have been responsible for providing us with this sort of information.

The changes between the old and the new versions of make are obviously not restricted to additions of past variants and the like. There is a tremendous amount of new and relevant material included here, from senses of the word that were not previously recognized to additional citations that better illustrate usage, or fill in historical gaps.

I’ll confess that I did not get much further in my comparison between the two makes; my vision began to swim a bit as my eyes darted back and forth from one version to the next. So instead I spent an hour looking over the newer make, roaming through all its many senses and reading it used by Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, some unnamed writer at Sports Illustrated, and hundreds of others. I enjoyed the fact that I was reading a great deal of information about one single word. I’ll not retain this information, but I did finish the hour with a healthy respect for the flexibility and range of our language in general and this word in specific.

And as always, when I spend time reading the dictionary, I looked at the work of lexicographers with renewed admiration. I think editing an already existing work seems more difficult that creating a new one from scratch. I couldn’t even sit there and simply read the two words concurrently without feeling like my mind was slipping away from me, much less try to evaluate whether it was time to make an addition based on the plural present indicative form of a word.

There are thousands and thousands of changes that have been made to this one entry; one entry that is one form of one word. I don’t know whether there was any cheering in Oxford when this one headword was finished, but I hope that someone gave the people who worked on it a banquet.