Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon SheaPerigee (Penguin), 2008

This was a good book to read while home sick with a cold: fun, funny, and not too mentally taxing. Shea, who says in the introduction to this book that he collects words the way other people collect tangible and/or valuable things, read the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in its entirety, and this book is the result. There’s a chapter for each letter, and in each chapter we get some narrative about the project, or about dictionaries generally, or about reading/words generally, followed by anywhere from three to thirty-two words starting with the chapter’s letter that Shea has pulled from his OED reading as being “outrageous, funny, or archaic and deserving of resurrection” (xii). Shea writes about “the enormous number of words that begin with be-” (including bedinner and bemissionary), and about slogging through 451 pages of words that start with the prefix un-. He writes about how different letters feel different: how W, for example, is a section of the dictionary that’s “overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon in origin,” since the letter W didn’t exist in ancient Latin. He writes about the trials of finding a comfortable/non-distracting place to read, and about remembering the first book he bought with his own money when he was a kid.

But the words themselves are really the highlight. Some that I particularly like:
“Apricity (n.) The warmth of the sun in winter.
“Impluvious (adj.) ”Wet with rain.” (Thomas Blount, Glossographia, 1656)”
“Jentacular (adj.) Of or pertaining to breakfast.
“Obdormition (n.) The falling asleep of a limb.
“Peristeronic (adj.) ”Suggestive of pigeons.” (OED)”
“Wine-knight (n.) A person who drinks valiantly.


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One response to “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon SheaPerigee (Penguin), 2008”

  1. james b chester Avatar

    This sounds like a fun book. I’m a fan of the OED, I do have a print edition that I bought many years ago, but I’ve never tried to read the entire thing.

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