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Published by Oxford University Press, USA, 2005
ISBN 10: 0192805762ISBN 13: 9780192805768
Book
Condition: Very Good. Very Good condition. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included.
Published by Oxford University Press, USA, 2005
ISBN 10: 0192805762ISBN 13: 9780192805768
Seller: MusicMagpie, Stockport, United Kingdom
Book
Condition: Very Good. 1705053092. 1/12/2024 9:51:32 AM.
Published by Oxford University Press, USA January 2005, 2005
ISBN 10: 0192805762ISBN 13: 9780192805768
Seller: Caspian Books, Tracy, CA, U.S.A.
Book
Trade Paperback. Condition: Very Good.
Published by Oxford University Press, New York, 2003
ISBN 10: 0198607024ISBN 13: 9780198607021
Seller: Ground Zero Books, Ltd., Silver Spring, MD, U.S.A.
Book First Edition
Hardcover. Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. Marion Ettlinger (Author photograph) (illustrator). First Printing [Stated]. xxvi, 260, [3] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Footnotes. Illustrations. Bibliography and Further Reading. Index. Small card on OED laid in--ephemera. There is wearing around the edges of the dust jacket. Simon Winchester is the author of the best-sellers Krakatoa, The Map That Changed The World, and The Professor and the Madman. He was a foreign correspondent for the Guardian and the Sunday Times and was based in Belfast, New Delhi, New York, London, and Hong Kong. Winchester has written for Conde Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. In 1969 Winchester joined The Guardian, first as a regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but later as its Northern Ireland correspondent.[2] Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast "Hour of Terror". In 1982, while working as chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held for three months as a prisoner in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. He wrote about this event in his book, Prison Diary, published in 1983 and also in Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire, published in 1985. On 4 July 2011 Winchester was naturalized as an American citizen in a ceremony aboard the USS Constitution. From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making--how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated--and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium--the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it--and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project--a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled uber-dictionary.