Word Wizards’ Rare Feat

For a dozen years, Elizabeth Girsch visited a world last seen 600 years ago.

Knights roamed. The Black Plague felled a third of England’s population. Beheadings were common. And surgeries, even for cataracts, were done on liquored-up patients held down by strong assistants.

The few literate people of the Middle Ages recorded all that and more in their cryptic writings. But for all the allure of these ancient images, it was the words themselves that held Girsch in thrall.

She was one of the scholars who documented English in mid-gestation as it emerged from a blend of Anglo-Saxon, French, German and other European languages over the course of four centuries.

The result, the Middle English Dictionary, was finished this summer. All told, the project took Girsch and 124 colleagues 71 years.

To outsiders, disentangling the meaning of all-but-unrecognizable words from centuries ago might seem tedious, possibly even pointless. To Girsch and her fellow lexicographers, however, it was a privilege--at least, most of the time.

“We all felt as though we were really the transmitters of something much more important than ourselves,” said Girsch, 49.

The dictionary covers 15,000 pages and includes more than 55,000 entries. The numerous meanings and usages are illustrated with 900,000 quotations ranging from the time of William the Conqueror to the advent of printing.

They come from Chaucer, the stories of King Arthur and early Bibles, as well as contemporary letters, wills and remarkably detailed medical treatises.

The Middle English Dictionary is “a labor of love . . . that is practically unrivaled in scale by any historical dictionary project of the modern era--and perhaps of any reference work project as well,” said Richard Ekman, a former officer with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which since 1975 has provided the bulk of the financing for the $22-million project.

It also may be among the last works of its kind, given the expense and long-term commitment such projects require.

Intellectual Descendant of Oxford Dictionary

The MED, an intellectual descendant of the first great historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, is a monument to dedication--and to optimism. It survived the Great Depression and shifts in scholarly fashion. Its completion has sparked a rare celebration of the monastic art and science of lexicography, which requires not only attention to detail but the capacity to sit alone for very, very long periods.

The project also highlights the ability of scholars to find joy in seemingly small--some would say arcane--intellectual discoveries.

Of what use, one might ask, was it for Girsch to spend years editing the pronouns “who” and “what” and “which”?

It certainly is helpful to grammarians and linguists, who want to understand how languages change--often subtly--over time. But beyond that, the dictionary is of interest to literary scholars and social historians, doctors researching ancient cures and political scientists tracing the evolution of individual rights.

Indeed, enthusiasts would argue, the MED is valuable to everyone, as one early backer said it would be, for the “light it [sheds] on the manners and customs of the time.”

The process was painstaking. For each word, editors sorted through and studied as many as several thousand quotations from medieval texts.

Some words had only a few quotes, making it difficult to figure out their meanings. So researchers looked for clues in other languages--similar words in Latin or Greek, for example.

“We were all frustrated detectives, I guess, because we loved chasing things down,” Girsch said.

Common words presented a different problem. The challenge was to discern all the different meanings--without splitting hairs.

For all the hard labor, there were occasional rewards. While editing the preposition “under,” Girsch came across this quote: “The King of Spain in a state, and the Duchess under the table.”

The words didn’t mean what they seemed to modern eyes. (The king was at the head table and his duchess at a lesser one.) Nonetheless, said Girsch, “that cracked me up for years.”

Few people, of course, will need the 162 quotations the dictionary gives for “fruit” or the 18-page entry for the word “do.” The longest entry in the dictionary--”taken”--runs an eye-glazing 50 pages, two columns to a page, single-spaced.

But Helen Aguera, who as a program officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities oversaw grants to the project, said its value is broader than it might seem.

“Anyone interested in knowing the foundations of the modern English language would be interested in this,” she said.

The dictionary, in its way, traces the ascendancy of the English language.

In 1100, French and Latin were the dominant languages of the English aristocracy and the learned. Only rural peasants spoke the four major English dialects. But by the 14th century, the English spoken in London had become a robust language of 45,000 words, 10,000 of them from an older French dialect.

The English Parliament in 1362 passed the Statute of Pleadings, declaring English the official language of government--although Latin continued to be used to record proceedings. Cementing its dominance, English was the language in which Chaucer chose to write his “Canterbury Tales,” beginning in 1387.

“The language was mutating and changing very rapidly,” said Larry Scanlon, editor of “Studies in the Age of Chaucer” and an English professor at Rutgers. With the Middle English Dictionary, he said, “we now have a complete picture of that moment in the development of the English language.”

For example, the French word “pacience,” which we would spell as “patience,” turns up in many quotes from the 14th and 15th centuries. Before that, however, patience was usually expressed as “tholemodnesse,” an older Anglo-Saxon word.

Lexicographers say the MED has already sharpened the etymologies and definitions in current dictionaries.

“If you love dictionaries, this is a marvelous one,” said Larry D. Benson, a Harvard University emeritus professor and general editor of the Riverside Chaucer, a compilation of all the author’s works, in Middle English, plus explanatory material, put together by an international team of experts.

Benson teaches a popular extension class on the “Canterbury Tales.” When his students read the Miller’s Tale, which represents Chaucer at his bawdiest, Benson suggests that they turn to the Middle English Dictionary for the name of the main character--”Hende Nicolas.” “Hende,” or “handy,” according to most translations, means “good with his hands” or, perhaps, “clever.” But in the MED one finds that the word meant “tricky,” “curious” and “willful” as well.

“They find this great range of meanings, and the word would begin to reverberate for them in delightful ways,” Benson said.

The dictionary was the University of Michigan’s longest-running research project.

“It adds a richness to human existence,” says university President Lee Bollinger.

Such an investment in fundamental humanities scholarship is worthwhile, he said, even if the dictionary is not popular or widely used.

“Adding to the store of human knowledge . . . is one of the noblest activities of a public university,” he said.

Other Projects Are Hurting Financially

Other dictionary projects underway today--most of them based at universities--are financially strapped.

Antoinette diPaolo Healey edits the Dictionary of Old English, a project launched in 1970 by the University of Toronto to document the language during the 500 years before 1100. Only six letters of the 22 then in use have been covered so far.

In 1991, Healey had to lay off two of six editors. That slowed things down. Now, the project is not expected to be done until 2019. So, instead of editing full time, which she loves, Healey spends much of her time raising money.

“It’s a never-ending struggle,” she said. “People don’t take the full measure of how important dictionaries are for the understanding of our culture.”

Other projects are in worse shape.

The Dictionary of American Slang published two volumes through the letter “O.” But its publisher, Random House, said no publication date has been set for future volumes. The Dictionary of American Regional English, underway at the University of Wisconsin, also has been published through O. Later volumes have been delayed and the dictionary is soliciting “all contributions, large and small.”

The Middle English Dictionary project, from the beginning, was fueled by scholarly passion.

The dictionary was first suggested in 1919 by a dry-witted Scot named Sir William A. Craigie, a co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Scholars, he argued, needed specialized dictionaries to augment the 13-volume OED’s broad sweep.

Although the MED project was begun elsewhere, it landed in Michigan in 1930. That year the Oxford English Dictionary’s editors donated more than 1 million “slips” of yellowing paper bearing quotations written in longhand. Quotations provide the evidence on which lexicographers base their definitions, and they show how words morph over time.

But many texts from the Middle Ages were found or edited after the Oxford dictionary was finished. So MED editors had to organize a campaign of volunteers to read all of those. By 1946, more than 3 million “slips” had been accumulated in 900 oversize shoe boxes.

Only if all that material were used, declared Hans Kurath, the project’s third editor, would the dictionary “find an honorable place on the reference shelves of medieval scholars and of the library.”

Helen Kao was the type of devoted scholar he was looking to hire. She was a graduate student in linguistics under Kurath when he invited her to join the project in 1954. She retired 40 years later.

She loved the work--in part because it was so solitary.

“With this work you just sit in a corner and do it without having to deal with the day-to-day problems in an office, with meetings and discussions and answering questions,” she said.

Progress was necessarily slow. Editors worked part time, also teaching courses at the university. From 1952, when the first 128-page segment was published, until 1979, the dictionary was taking an average of almost four years per letter.

“We never thought we could really finish it,” Kao said. “There were many lean years when the university couldn’t spare all the money we needed.”

But in 1975, the project received a major boost: a $950,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. That was enough to hire eight full-time editors, most of them newly minted PhDs with a rich background in modern and ancient languages.

Among them was Mary Jane Williams, now 60, who knows Greek and Latin, plus Middle and Old English. To some, the work seemed like “being sentenced to do your doctoral dissertation forever,” she said.

Williams didn’t see it that way. “It was a roller coaster,” she said. “You never knew what you were going to find next.”

They were supposed to finish by 1982. But when Robert E. Lewis came aboard that year as the project’s fifth editor, the letter P had just been finished.

Lewis gave bonuses to editors who worked quickly. But, even so, “it was hard to push the editors a lot, because they knew they were working themselves out of a job.”

The delays, though, may have worked in the dictionary’s favor. Had it been finished earlier, it might never have been accessible via computer.

Frances McSparran, an associate professor of English, pushed to get the dictionary online. It was also her idea to link the MED to the texts it quotes as well as to other online dictionaries.

Online Version Called Indispensable

With the project completed, lexicographers are looking forward to the first major rewrite of the Oxford English Dictionary since it was completed in 1928. That effort is supposed to be finished in 2010.

John Simpson, that dictionary’s editor, said the computerized version of the MED is indispensable; each of his 50 editors uses it to trace words back to their first appearance hundreds of years ago.

So, the work on the Middle English Dictionary has come to an end (“ende,” also spelled “eende,” “eynede,” “inde,” “yende” and “yinde,” and first found in an 1175 text). And history has come full circle. A project that was launched to supplement the Oxford English Dictionary is now being used as a source to improve the masterpiece of lexicography itself.

The editors of the MED say they are proud to have been part of the undertaking. But now, many also feel a sense of loss.

“Working there gave us a window into a world in a way that nobody who hasn’t been there can understand,” Girsch said. “I loved it. I miss it every day in a way that makes it hard to step back into the modern world again.”