JOHN SIMPSON:I'm John Simpson, Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I'm here talking to Simon Winchester, who is the author of The Professor and the Madman, both about the writing of the book and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Simon, The Professor and the Madman tells a fascinating story. How did you come across it in the first place?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, you're probably aware, John, that there's a book by Jonathan Green called Chasing the Sun, which is a history of dictionary making. And I was actually reading this book in the bath one winter's day about two years ago. And there was a footnote which said, you know, in a rather offhand way that, of course, readers will be familiar with the extraordinary story of Dr. W. C. Minor, the American lunatic murderer who was imprisoned in Broadmoor and became a prolific contributor to the OED.

I remember vividly sitting up in the bath and saying I've never heard of this story. And I rang one person in your office, Elizabeth Knowles, who you'll know well, I dare say, and said, "Elizabeth, do you know anything--" well, first of all, I apologized and said, "It's rather vulgar. I'm calling you from my bath in America, but do you know anything about this chap called W. C. Minor?"

And she said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I know rather more about him than most people because I wrote a paper about him for a journal, a quarterly, I think, published in Madison, Wisconsin called 'Dictionaries.' And if you'd like, if you get out of the bath, I'll fax it to you and you can read it when you'reÑtoweling yourself dry," and so she did.

And I read it and I thought if I can get access to the Broadmoor files on this man, then perhaps there's rather a good book to be written.

JOHN SIMPSON: Was it a difficult thing to do because you must have had access to all sorts of out of the way medical records only held in Broadmoor. Did they give you access easily?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, I thought it would be terribly difficult. He was also imprisoned for quite a long time in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC. And what I thought would happen was because Americans are so free with information and the British are so, as you well know, traditionally rather guarded with it, that it would be very easy to get American information on him but very difficult to get the Broadmoor information.

In fact, quite the reverse happened. Broadmoor, for all sorts of reasons, is under attack by the British press at the moment. And when they had someone who was at least purporting to be a historian coming along and saying, "I'd like to write about Broadmoor of 150 years ago," they said, "That's actually a rather good idea." And they opened up their files and I was able to go many, many times to Broadmoor and -- to have a look at the thousands and thousands of pages that are his medical papers.

St. Elizabeth's, by contrast in Washington, is now under the control of the District of Columbia government, which is not a government with a particularly happy recent record. And they didn't want to give me the papers at all. And I nearly had to sue to get the papers and it might have cost a great deal of money and taken a lot of time.

But in fact, it turned out that they were all available through the Internet and so a couple of clicks on the button and my Visa card number and they all arrived in a FedEx package the next day. So generally speaking, the papers were quite easy to get.

JOHN SIMPSON: You must have been surprised at the book's popularity. Did it-- did it take you by surprise, and what do you think it is about the book that intrigues readers and captures their imagination?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, the first thing, I was totally astonished by the success of the book because not a single one of my books has ever done well. Very few, I think, have ever earned out their advances. But this one suddenly took off after a very kind review written in The New York Times that was published on Labor Day 1998, a Labor Day that happened to be a rainy day and New Yorkers stayed at home instead of lazing around on the beach and read the paper and read the review. And obviously a large number of them thought they'd buy it, and then word of mouth took over.

But as to why it became so successful, well, I think-- I'm sure you'd agree that the simple story of murder and redemption of W. C. Minor's character through the work for the OED is a -- is quite a good story.

But I think there's another agenda in here. I think that people like-- and this very much plays into your hand, I think, like the rituals of lexicography. They find it romantic. They find the story of dictionary making something that if they can get to it painlessly and rather through the story of a murderer and the American Civil War and all the other elements of this book, they find it an agreeable thing to do to learn about lexicography in a -- in a somewhat romantic way. And that's my only explanation for the way the book has done.

JOHN SIMPSON: Why do you think Dr. Minor was particularly drawn towards the dictionary?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, probably you can answer that better than I and maybe you've got some views on it. But I think -- I mean, he -- he clearly was a deeply mad man. And maybe the soothing rituals of lexicography, the calm and the attention to detail and the long hours somehow appealed to someone who in other hours of the night, because it was the nighttime that his madness was most obvious, it becomes a soothing ritual.

I mean, you tell me what's it like as a lexicographer? Is-- is it a very meticulous, time consuming kind of work that soothes you in a way?

JOHN SIMPSON: You-- you paint a very bleak picture of lexicographers. (LAUGHTER) It's certainly the case that Dr. Minor contributed to the OED. But I think some people have the impression that he also edited the dictionary.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, if you want to hear that story--

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I think it's probably worth straightening out the fact that the material he supplied was the raw -- some of the raw material from which the editors analyzed the language, and so there was a filter before the material was actually published and the definitions were written by the editorial staff. Yes, it is meticulous work. I used to say it requires a lot of common sense as well. I think in his lucid hours, he probably had a very analytical mind. You do need to be analytical to analyze the raw material of the language, which is the quotation texts that readers like Dr. Minor and others contributed in the 19th century in the thousands.

SIMON WINCHESTER: How did you get into this whole business in the first place?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well--

SIMON WINCHESTER: I mean, did you read English at Oxford? Is that how it started?

JOHN SIMPSON: I've always been fascinated with words. And when I read English, I read English at York, English literature. Although I was doing a literature course, I was trying to immerse myself, I suppose, in Old English and Middle English and Old Norse. I couldn't see the point of learning Old English if you couldn't read the Icelandic Old Norse sagas. So I got involved in that.

SIMON WINCHESTER: So can you do that? You can read the sagas in Old Norse?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, one wants to be able to, doesn't one?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Can you? Can you?

JOHN SIMPSON: Yeah. I can-- I can read them, yeah. But that's a different kettle of fish altogether. But the Old Norse sagas are fantastic.

SIMON WINCHESTER: How did you get involved in the dictionary itself?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I mean, simply by the traditional means of seeing an advertisement for-- you know, do you want to become an assistant for the Oxford English Dictionary? And I thought, "Well, I don't want to become a teacher. Research sounds like the sort of thing I'd like to do, and here's an opportunity." So I turned up for an interview and got the job, and that was 25 years ago.

So -- and we do find that when people start working on the Dictionary, they either last six months because they go up in smoke and they can't stand it and they move to become an accountant or a lawyer or something sensible or they just get fascinated by it and continue maybe for the rest of their lives, and that's what Dr. Minor did. That's what Dr. Murray did. That's what all the old contributors to the OED did. And we've got many readers today who have been associated with us all the time I've been at the dictionary.

SIMON WINCHESTER: What was your first -- I mean, the first couple of years, what kinds of things were you doing?

JOHN SIMPSON: Oh, actually, one of the nice things about working on the OED is that you do feel you're -- that you're contributing straightaway to the final product. The first thing I did was to have to -- was-- like Dr. Minor, I was given a book to read and to read it against the dictionary, looking for words that weren't in the dictionary and maybe should be, or good examples of words that were already in the dictionary that could be used in future to supplement the record. I should point out that the Oxford English Dictionary, as you know, doesn't just have definitions, but also has a fairly comprehensive record of a word's use from written sources from the earliest time that we've been able to find a record of the word in English down to either the present day or when the word dropped out of use. And those were the quotations that Dr. Minor was supplying, mainly from 16th and 17th century sources.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, that raises an interesting point. When you started your work 25 years ago, were you looking for words that were illustrative of the first use of words that were already in the dictionary, or were you looking at modern books for the first use of modern words?

JOHN SIMPSON: When I started working, we were working on what was called a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, and that was principally 19th and 20th century additions to the language. So I was reading a book by a man called Metz on the language of film, I think. So it was mainly 20th century words. Film words, that sort of thing. That work continued on the supplement to the OED until the 1980s and at that point we expanded -- broadened backwards in time again to pick up historical pre-datings to the dictionary, which is what we're engaged on now. Nowadays, the comprehensive revision of the OED that we're working on involves reading material and analyzing material back from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the present day, which is a fascinating biography of every word, really.

SIMON WINCHESTER: The OED, in-- in writing these biographies of individual words, has considerable and justified pride in claiming in most cases to have found the quotation that shows the first ever written use of most words. But sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes, I believe, the Germans are rather keen on showing that they can find an even earlier example in the written record. Does that cue that you don't always get it right?

JOHN SIMPSON: No, because if you think you go into, say, the Library of Congress or if you go into the British Library and look at all the books that they have on the shelves and then if you can get taken down into the stacks or up into the stacks and see all the books that are there and you think that language isn't just what's published in books, you know you're not going to necessarily capture the first ever instance of-- of any word or sense of a word.

And in fact, Sir James Murray in a famous lecture he gave in 1900 called "On The Evolution of Lexicography" stated that he thought that although the work he'd done was as comprehensive as it could have been done at the time, about two-thirds of the words in the OED could be antedated. Earlier examples could be found of them. And that's what we're finding now.

I mean, we're finding in revising the dictionary that at least one in every two words we're able to find earlier evidence for, and really that's just the start. I think as more historical databases become available on computer, as more people become fascinated in reading for the dictionary and reading books as well as just looking online at these big databases, we'll find more and more evidence. So it's fine as far as I'm concerned. It's fascinating. It just focuses the picture much more sharply.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Can you take us back to 25 years ago, when you were working on Metz's book on film? Did you dream then that you would be following in the footsteps of Coleridge and Fernable and Murray and all those people in becoming the editor of this great book one day?

JOHN SIMPSON: No, not at the time. I mean, I think though there was such a number of distinguished editors already in the department, you just saw yourself working at that level. I don't know. I didn't think about it. It was my first job out of university and I was a sort of raw graduate and it was just a fascinating thing to do for a researcher.

No. I mean, one of my colleagues went off to become the editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from English Sources, so he then left the department. Another one became a classics lecturer at Oxford and others left. Time passes--

SIMON WINCHESTER: Paving the way for you.

JOHN SIMPSON: Time passes and I don't know. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I liked the work. I was obviously quite good at it and it was a great opportunity, yeah.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Tell me how you think the English language in the way that the OED deliberately allows -- welcomes the idea that English is a flexible, constantly expanding, constantly changing language, but the French, the 40 mortals at the Institute in Paris, take quite a different view and regard French as sanctified and fixed. From your position in this lofty aerie, how do you regard the two countries' approaches to their languages?

JOHN SIMPSON: I think it's based principally on the different types of languages they are. I think French has not had a tradition of being influenced by other languages over history. I mean, English, on the other hand, has been invaded by the French, the Norman Conquest. We've had empires route around the world, and so we've had words coming into English from travelers to the former colonies. And we've expanded to America and into New Zealand, Australia, etc., etc.

So English is really a patchwork language and therefore is quite receptive to change and is able to accept changes because there isn't a single fixed pattern for English, whereas French is more of a monolithic language. There's rather less -- I mean, one doesn't like to use words like sort of purity and things, but on the other hand, most French words have got a fairly long pedigree in French, whereas if you look at a sentence of modern day English, you'll see Latin and Greek and French and German and all sorts of other influences. So I think in general, the English speaking people in general as a community are more receptive to change maybe than the French Academy is. That doesn't mean that the French people themselves don't change the language and of course the language does rather like it. The language rides roughshod over the Academy, in fact.

And people in England in the 18th century, 100 years after the French Academy was set up, wanted to introduce an Academy into England so that the language could be fixed. This was a time of Augustan purity, etc., in English.

SIMON WINCHESTER: And you would be very much against that, would you not?

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes. The interesting thing was that although people like Swift and Dryden and Pope introduced this language and put forth proposals for setting up an Academy and fixing the language, Dr. Johnson, when he came to write his dictionary in the middle of the 18th century, started off when he published a plan of the dictionary in 1747 in which he showed he was part of this tradition of wanting to fix the language, that the language had reached a point of perfection, as instanced in the work of the major authors of the previous century.

SIMON WINCHESTER: And someone like Swift, for instance, didn't. There were so many words he objected to. The word couldn't.

JOHN SIMPSON: Uh-huh.

SIMON WINCHESTER: I mean, could not was fine by Swift, but couldn't, he said, was not English. But you would, of course, say it is English.

JOHN SIMPSON: It's not English. You can't say it ain't English, can you? (laughter) And by the time Johnson finished working on his dictionary, working from all these sources that he was amassing and analyzing and writing his dictionary, in the final famous introduction to his dictionary, he rejected the idea that you could fix the language in a dictionary and his dictionary was essentially a statement of what the language was at a particular point in time.

And clearly, it's moved on since then and we're trying to record the changes that are happening now as well as filling in those changes that we've missed in the past.

The trouble with being a lexicographer is that you can always be wrong. I mean, as you said before, isn't it nice that the OED gives the first recorded evidence for a particular word? We always know that there's probably earlier evidence for a word. And even if there's not written evidence, the word was probably around in spoken language before it was actually printed. Only a small subset of words that is spoken is actually printed. So you're dealing with a subset of material, anyway.

But there is an awful lot of it in the libraries. I mean, if we didn't have libraries, where would we be for remembering our culture? And so it's fascinating rooting around in these sources and trying to fill in the picture.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Finding occasionally mice. I gather that in the old Oxford University archives, in the slips they found the tail of a mouse between some of the old slips, but it wasn't filed under M.

JOHN SIMPSON: No. It was filed under A, I think. It was the beginning of the alphabet that the mice got to. No, you find curious things amongst these. We've got millions of these index cards or slips in the department and nowadays most material is collected electronically. But until about 1990, most of the material came into the department on these index cards. And you find remarkable evidence of people's lives on these cards.

I mean, on the one hand, readers used to write them out by hand, so you could sort of tell from how a reader had written a card that day whether you were, you know, not feeling so good or whether they were hurried or whether they had to rush out to the shops or something, which you can't necessarily do when you see the equivalent material on a computer screen with just the sort of regular ABC of the computer alphabet.

And also, we have a collection of slips that was donated to the department about 15 years ago from a reader in America who'd spent an awful lot of time reading material about the First World War military slang in America. He read magazines like Stars and Stripes and various others things and then he expanded into all sorts of other areas of slang.

And unfortunately, he died in a house fire, but his slips survived him. And one of our researchers in Washington went to his funeral because he used to work in the Library of Congress. She used to work in the Library of Congress. They used to meet for coffee sometimes and chat about their word searches. And she met his widow at the funeral and she said, "We must do something with this material. At the moment, it's in Maryland and he would have loved it to have been useful rather than just remain as a pile of collected material." And so they arranged to send the material over to the OED in Oxford and 26 cartons of the material arrived after a sort of tempestuous sea crossing. It was rather like the 19th century stories of material from America.

And now it's being incorporated in our files and -- but within that, you have evidence of the man's life. When they first came, the cartons still -- the slips still smelled of the tinge of smoke. And you could actually see he used file dividers which he made himself by cutting up into squares material from the boxes in which his pipe tobacco came.

SIMON WINCHESTER: So you saw all sorts of evidence of the reader's life in the material that came which you don't necessarily get when you're just looking at material on a computer.

You're still, of course, collecting new words today and collecting quotations today. How are you soliciting material because the old idea of an appeal for readers, which James Murray and his predecessors and immediate successors put out and distributed in libraries and bookstores all over the English-speaking world, how do you appeal for volunteers and readers today?

JOHN SIMPSON: We have a newsletter which is published and we invite people to send material in to us, either by e-mail or by regular post, and people do. We have a combination of readers who are on a paid reading program which our reading program manager organizes and we read through various types of literature to collect material there.

But to some extent, what is most interesting to me is the volunteer readers that just work away in university libraries or just getting books out of their local town library, reading obscure 15th century texts and sending us hundreds of citations with a little patch word at the top which we -- so we file it under that word. And when we get to revise that word, maybe there's a 15th century antedating of the word that we only thought was current from the 16th century. That sort of thing isn't unusual now because there's an awful lot of social documentation that's been published since the OED's original reading program in the 19th century.

The OED has been criticized to some extent for concentrating on the literary classics of the past. That's a little bit untrue to some extent. But since the 19th century, there's been an awful lot of just ordinary journals, commonplace books, diaries, personal reports, the publication of local records societies with wills and little bits of social documentation that give you an insight into the way everyday people lived rather than how Shakespeare lived or Shakespeare write or Milton wrote. And just scanning through that material, reading of that material, gives you a marvelous picture of the way people lived in centuries in the past.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Who are these volunteers?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, some of them are retired university lecturers, some of them are university lecturers, and some of them are just ordinary people living at home who've got an interest in language and a fairly strong analytical ability.

SIMON WINCHESTER: But they're not ordinary people, are you? They're often somewhat -- well, they were in the past -- slightly dotty, slightly obsessive, slightly meticulous.

JOHN SIMPSON: I think there's a quality of liking to collect things that you can't get away from. Probably both in the readers and in many of the lexicographers. The idea of classifying and the fact that if you work long and hard enough, you can form a fairly comprehensive picture of -- and you can have -- you can find all the stones in a mosaic and you see the final picture. So yes. I mean, I think people -- it is the sort of thing that you become quite obsessed with, but I'm not sure to the extent that Dr. Minor became obsessed.

SIMON WINCHESTER: In the old days, you used to have parties in Oxford and you used to-- some of the great contributors who, like Minor, but not including Minor because he couldn't get away to these parties, they would be invited. Do you occasionally hold get-togethers these days?

JOHN SIMPSON: I think the last main one was when the second edition of the OED was published back in 1989 and we had a number of different parties for readers and contributors and academics who used to review our entries.

SIMON WINCHESTER: It must be a pretty extraordinary party of a bunch of very dotty people all coming together, drinking bad sherry.

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I think you have two misconceptions there. First, that all aca-- all OED assistants and staff readers are mad, and that Oxford produces bad sherry. (laughter) The second is probably true.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes.

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes. It was fascinating for me to meet them. I mean, usually one's just year after year receiving written communications from them. Some of them write back to me. There's one gentleman in New York who's continually saying to me, "Why do you write such short letters in reply, John?" And finally, about two weeks ago, he sent me a letter in which he said, "I've now discovered why you write me such short letters. It's because you don't like to be wrong. And the less you write, the less--" and this is nonsense. It's just that I've got so much to do during the day that I can't -- I mean, I've love to spend my whole life corresponding to these fascinating readers, but there's just not the time.

He's another fascinating example of a reader who-- he started off as a cryptographer, so I think probably he's interested in classifying and declassifying and decrypting things and analyzing data. And he became interested in trying to research the truth about expressions such as "the Big Apple" or "the Great White Way" for Broadway. And he certainly, working in the New York Public Library day in and day out for many years, has sent us an awful lot of material that shows these terms being used earlier than the OED had originally thought.

And it's not just the words themselves. It's the story that they throw out. So if you're researching the Big Apple, you know, why apple, why big, why in 1910 or 1920 rather than in 1930--

SIMON WINCHESTER: So what's the answer? Why big? Why apple?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I think -- I can't actually remember the full details. I have an idea, but the various jazz venues around -- around America that were -- were known as apples and New York was the Big Apple because it was the central one. But I haven't checked that, so I might be wrong. You can't always believe what lexicographers tell you. (laughs)

SIMON WINCHESTER: It seems to me in the last few years of 20th century that this is a very rich time for the creation of new words, that there seem to be more words being born nowadays than, let's say, there might have been 50 years ago. Is that true or are words being constantly coming up at a fairly steady rate through the centuries?

JOHN SIMPSON: I think people always think that their own time is one of the most creative and prolific times for language creation. I think as far as the evidence in the OED is concerned, and we can now tell a bit more about that because we've got the OED on computer and you can run various programs to check on currency at various times in the past. That principally shows that from the records that we have, the period of Shakespeare and the early modern period was a period of great creativity. And also probably the end of the 19th century and the current period now, although it's difficult for us to analyze the current period terribly easily because words don't get into the OED straightaway. So we're really -- it's easy to have an overview of the language maybe 25 years ago or so because the word that came up last week, we want to gather material for maybe five years or so and analyze it before we put it directly into the dictionary.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, how do you determine when a word really is a word worthy of inclusion? I was asking this question to your Canadian opposite number the other day and she said 15 quotations of a word means to her that the word is a word worthy of inclusion. Do you apply such a hard and fast rule?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I don't apply rules -- I don't use expressions like "real word" and "worthy of inclusion." I mean, that sets a quality judgement which we don't necessarily work on. No. We've been reading texts for the last 150 years, so we have large files. And we have to decide what -- we base our inclusion policy into the dictionary on number of citations that we have in the files.

And in general, it would be if we've got, say, five examples of a word, then we'll put it forward for potential addition to the dictionary. That's not necessarily a word. It could be a sub-sense of a word, a meaning of the word, or it could be a phrase or a proverb or a compound.

So I guess she isn't, in fact, working on an historical dictionary. She's working on a dictionary of modern Canadian English, so -- but she probably has different criteria than we have. We actually troll pretty deep, and most words that people -- if people come to OED and visit and I say to them, "Tell me a new word that you know and we'll see if we've got evidence for it," they usually come up with words that were actually current about ten or 15 years ago originally and we've had them in the dictionary for a long time, and the most up to date ones they may not necessarily know about.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, you used the phrase just now trolling through the literature, which makes me think of a word. And I don't want to put you on the spot here, but there's one word which I've been fascinated by for a long time since an editor in the Guardian told me about it, and that's the word malmarocking, which means the-- as I'm sure you know, the carousing of drunken seamen on icebound vessels.

JOHN SIMPSON: We've changed -- we had to actually change the definition of that in the revised edition of the OED--

SIMON WINCHESTER: Right.

JOHN SIMPSON: --slightly. It's one of these words that is picked up, I think, from a 19th century seagoing -- I don't know. I'm not sure what the original text was, but there's one or two references in the 19th century and it has been picked up as a curious dictionary word.

It was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary and it got into various small dictionaries and was kept in as a curiosity, as some dictionaries do keep words in as curiosities rather than reflecting real usage.

SIMON WINCHESTER: That was my point. I mean, it's a dictionary curiosity rather than a real word, if I can use that.

JOHN SIMPSON: Real word, yes. (laughs)

SIMON WINCHESTER: What you are looking for nowadays particularly are citations, presumably the earliest, of an awful lot of computer-type words, are you, like e-mail and webpage and so forth?

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes. Actually, we're working on the word mail itself, m-a-i-l, and revising the entry since it was first written in -- about 1904. And obviously at that time, they had the postal mail sense. But what's interesting now is how there's variations around the world over which countries -- which varieties of English use mail and which use post. So we had a sort of survey.

SIMON WINCHESTER: The English use post, of course. Americans use mail.

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes, but what happens in New Zealand and Australia and Canada and South Africa and elsewhere? So I e-mailed a number of dictionary editors on these various continents, in these various countries to try to determine who followed the American pattern, who followed the British pattern.

And it seemed that most followed the American pattern, whereas -- but I think New Zealand and South Africa, English-speaking South Africa, tended to use post instead of mail. But now I think it was last Tuesday, I added a new entry to the dictionary for mail meaning e-mail. What's that film called?

SIMON WINCHESTER: "You Have Mail."

JOHN SIMPSON: "You Have Mail." That's right. And so then that sort of slightly shifts the whole balance of the word mail. Because people are using it constantly in a computer e-mail context, are we in Britain and New Zealand and South Africa going to start using mail for post more frequently? I think we are.

I mean, obviously in Britain, we still talk about the Royal Mail in-- in fixed collocations, but we use post in ordinary speech. I tend to talk about mail sometimes rather than post. It's sort of shifting. In 20 years' time, it may be a completely different picture as well.

SIMON WINCHESTER: A word which has long fascinated me because I am in one sense a travel writer is the word travel itself, which came originally, I think, from the Latin tripaleum, which was a three-legged instrument that was invented by Nero to torture people. And that eventually got into travail, the French word for work. And when travel, and I want you to correct me, but I think it all comes from the OED, when travel was first introduced into the English language, it meant something that was hard and difficult. It was work. It wasn't -- one never travelled for pleasure. One undertook a travail.

And only lately did travel become something associated, as it is today, with pleasure. And it's a very interesting progression from torture to work to pleasure.

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes. Well, there was two entries in the OED, one for travail, which is work or it could mean labor. It could have been the labor of childbirth or any sort of hard work, and it was also the sense of travel, meaning moving around. And when I get into the letter T, I'll confirm your suspicions.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Do you have a favorite word? And let me preface this once again by saying that the-- when I asked this question of your Canadian colleague, who is not, as you say, doing an historical dictionary, she said all words are equally lovely or equally horrible.

And I said that there were some-- in my opinion, there were some words which were just ghastly and I wish they'd never been invented, but on the other hand, words like butterfly and dawn were lovely. Do you have a view or not?

JOHN SIMPSON: It's-- it's nice that you mentioned the word butterfly, which has got itself rather an unpleasant entomology problem, which we won't go into. But I'll actually -- I would actually suggest one of the words-- a word like macrolepadactra is one of my favorite words. My favorite word is always the last one I've worked on.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Is a macrolepadactra a big butterfly hunter or a big butterfly?

JOHN SIMPSON: Or is it a butterfly hunter with a big net? Yes. No, it's an informal name. It's not a taxonomic name, but it means -- it's a collector's name for large butterflies and moths, the sort of things that you actually might collect if you're a butterfly collector. Now the curious thing about that word, which I don't think I'd heard of before I came across it in the OED, although if you look on the Internet, there are all sorts of examples of the macrolepadactra of Borneo, etc., if you want to find them, the curious thing was that the OED originally when it included the word in 1904 gave the origin as from, as I said, it was an English formation from macro and lepadactra, which both existed in English as words. But nowadays, we're much more conscious that English wasn't necessarily the coiner of these scientific terms.

And actually, the scientific community throughout Europe and in America might have been using these terms. And looking in online book catalogues, we eventually found an example of the word from an Italian book title from 1851, which is 40 years earlier than the OED had it.

And so we included that information in the entomology, and the interesting thing for me, really, is that word is typical of evidence that the OED should be looking throughout English and its neighboring countries.

You have to remember that there was a community of scientists, if you like, in the 19th century and they were swapping words around. And you can't necessarily assume, as the OED originally often did, that a word came from English. It may as well have looked like it came in English -- as an English creation but actually first started off in Salzburg or Paris or Milan or something like that.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Which brings me to a question that I've longed to ask you. Are you an English chauvinist, do you think?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I think working on the OED nowadays, you can't be. I mean, that is what I was saying just now about having to recognize that English doesn't create as much as the original OED maybe thought it did and English is just part of a spectrum of language, if you like.

And no, it means that you have to look around. We're looking for influences on English and of English on other countries and other languages rather than seeing the English language as a sort of monolithic pedestal.

SIMON WINCHESTER: But it is a world language now without a doubt.

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes, and what does world language mean?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, what does it mean?

JOHN SIMPSON: What does it mean? (laughs) Well, I think people have two meanings for world English, if you like. One is the idea that there are parts of every standard English around the world that are common and therefore constitute a world English. So if you use that variety of English in America, you'll also be understood elsewhere around the English-speaking world. But also, world English means -- people talk about world English, really, which is a recognition that there are varieties of English with their own internal consistencies and tactic and grammatical and lexical consistency in different parts of the world. Whether that's in different parts -- there'll be various varieties of English in America, in Australia, in New Zealand, etc., etc. So yes. I mean, it does reinforce the idea that English is a world language, but there are different varieties used within that world language.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Tell me, the CD-ROM is actually a very good tool to use for searching for the kind of question I was wanting to ask you. It is said, wrongly or rightly, I don't know, that in Inuit, in the Eskimo languages, there are many, many words for different types of snow. In the English language, is there any particular field that attracts a particularly large number of words?

JOHN SIMPSON: It's difficult to say. That's a fallacy about Eskimo languages, I think. So whether there's an equivalent fallacy in English, I don't know. I mean, you'd expect England to have words for different types of rain: drizzle, the fog, the mist that drifts up the Lincolnshire coastline, etc., etc. So yes. A mizzle, drizzle, haze, what's the difference between fog and mist, etc., etc.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Anything to do with gloomy weather.

JOHN SIMPSON: Anything to do with gloomy weather. Not so much to do with sunny weather, no. There's just it's a nice day. It's sunny. And I think, I mean, you notice anything in the dictionary that you do come across quite a few words for. For example -- being drunk. There's a whole thesaurus of words for overindulgence, I suppose, which seems to be quite common these days. How one manages to differentiate between the different degrees, I don't necessarily know.

SIMON WINCHESTER: This paints a rather dreadful picture of England as being a land of gloomy weather where everyone gets drunk all the time.

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes.

SIMON WINCHESTER: But the language and the dictionary therefore can almost inadvertently paint a portrait of the society that uses the language.

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, I think inevitably a dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary is a historical portrait of a language and a culture and a history. I mean, I don't think I'd be working on the dictionary if it was just a dictionary of definitions. I mean, it's a social history. It's a cultural document.

SIMON WINCHESTER: How has the computer changed the way you do things?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, when I first joined the dictionary in 1976, we had, I think, no computers in the department. We were actually quite slow to get into computing because we were near to the end of a long 20-year project. We didn't want to deflect our interests from actually getting that completed. That was the publishing objective.

But what happened when we had completed it is that in the 1980s, we started to use editorial systems, which allowed us to both define onscreen and also to search material in onscreen databases. And that has revolutionized what we do. I mean, a lot of our searching for -- if we're working on a word, there are nowadays probably about 20 different major historical databases that we can look into to see if we can find earlier or later examples of the word. In 20 years' time, there's going to be hundreds -- hundreds of these databases and the difficulty will be to know which to look at.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Now the second edition, the one that came out in 1989, has a CD-ROM version, as you've mentioned. The third edition, which is due out in 2005, is it, or 2010?

JOHN SIMPSON: 2010.

SIMON WINCHESTER: 2010. Is that -- are we going to see a hard copy of that or is it--

JOHN SIMPSON: I think we'll inevitably see a hard copy of that because people want a landmark publication that they can refer back to. But I think before then, you're going to start seeing revised material becoming available online from the OED, so you won't have to wait until 2010 to see what we're doing at the moment.

And what I was talking about earlier about the entry for mail, for example, I would hope that we publish that in the near future. So people will be able to live along with the story of the English language in the same way that they used to in the 19th century when they used to buy installments of the dictionary as it came out in sections or facticles, as they used to call them. We won't call them facticles these days, but they'll be, you know, updates.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Can we call them cyber-facticles?

JOHN SIMPSON: No, we can't. (laughter)

SIMON WINCHESTER: So you do agree there are some words which are too ugly for inclusion in the language?

JOHN SIMPSON: I do think cyber words are a borderline.

SIMON WINCHESTER: You hate them all, do you?

JOHN SIMPSON: I wouldn't say hate, but I find them a little bit difficult to use myself. One thing I was wondering about, Simon, was whether you thought your book has made people want to know more about the OED and caused them to go out and buy their own copy of the OED.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, I've done quite a lot of signings in the last nine months or so since the book was published and a huge number of people have come up to me and said, "If only I could afford it, I would buy the dictionary." And of course, there's been a promotion which enable people to get it at a considerable reduction. And I understand that -- it's a long way of answering your question -- I think yes, it has made people want to buy the OED. And something like 1500 sets of the 20-volume work have been sold as a pretty direct result of people reading my book. So I'm delighted about that and we'll see what happens in the future. But if it's rekindled interest in the OED, then you must be rather pleased, I would have thought.

JOHN SIMPSON: As far as I'm concerned, yes. And yes, if it gives people the idea of going out and buying the CD-ROM, that's terrific as far as I'm concerned.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Now finally, if people listening to this want to help in the construction of the third edition of Oxford English Dictionary and want to search for illustrative quotations, much as W.C. Minor did back in the 1880s, to whom should they write and how should they submit what they want to submit?

JOHN SIMPSON: There are two principal ways of submitting material to the OED. I will say that if people do find a word which they think ought to be included in the OED or they think it might be an earlier example, it is most useful to us if they can first of all find a copy of the OED in their local library and check in that and not send us material that duplicates what we already have because our editorial staff has a limited amount of time to work on everything in the dictionary.

But certainly, if people have got material to send to us, then they should either send it by e-mail, look up the OED website at oed.com, or send it by post to me, John Simpson, at the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Great Claredon Street, Oxford, OX2 60P in the United Kingdom.

SIMON WINCHESTER: And if they do that enough times, there's a possibility that sometime in the future they'll be summoned to Oxford to meet all their like-minded colleagues.

JOHN SIMPSON: Yes. Maybe we'll have a virtual party with good sherry.

SIMON WINCHESTER: That would be a splendid idea. John, thank you very much, indeed.

JOHN SIMPSON: Thank you.

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