Abstract
The ten volumes of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, published by Oxford University Press between 1884 and 1928 (renamed the Oxford English Dictionary in 1933), make an imposing sight on the library shelves. One of the great achievements of nineteenth-century comparative philology, the New English Dictionary consumed the labors of successive editors and teams of assistants over four decades (not to mention the efforts of some 800 volunteer readers in the first five years alone). The resulting volumes, and subsequent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, have long been acknowledged as the definitive guide to the English language—a pedagogic institution in itself.
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Notes
Lee Sterrenburg, “Significant Evidences and the Imperial Archive: Response,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (2004): 278.
See John Willinksy, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
and Phil Benson, Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary (London: Routledge, 2001).
James A. H. Murray, ed., A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), vii.
Preface to vol. 5, New English Dictionary (1901), quoted in Lynda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2005), 163.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.
H. Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms; Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (1886, Delhi: Rupa& Co., 1986), ix-x.
Richard W. Bailey, “National and Regional Dictionaries of English,” in Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. A. P. Cowie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1: 287.
Javed Majeed, “The Bad Habit: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian Glossaries, and Intimations of Mortality,” Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 46–47 (November 2006): 10.
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 6.
Amitav Ghosh, “Of Fanás and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail,” Economic and Political Weekly (June 21, 2008): 58.
Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longman, 1864), 78.
Jacques Lezra, “Nationum Origo,” in Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 205–267.
Braj B. Kachru, “The New Englishes and Old Dictionaries: Directions in Lexicographical Research on Non-native Varieties of English,” in Theory and Method in Lexicography: Western and Non-Western Perspectives, ed. Ladislav Zguta (Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press, 1980), 79–80.
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© 2011 Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali
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Teltscher, K. (2011). The Floating Lexicon: Hobson-Jobson and the OED. In: Sengupta, I., Ali, D. (eds) Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119000_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119000_3
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