Sarah Ogilvie: The Dictionary People
The Book Club
English - September 20, 2023 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 37 ratingsBooks Arts politics culture news comedy health entrepreneur business entrepreneurship leadership interview Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Francesca Peacock: Pure Wit
Next Episode: Mary Beard: Emperor of Rome
In this week's Book Club podcast I'm talking to Sarah Ogilvie about the extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told in her new The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. She tells me why the OED was different in kind from any previous English dictionary, how crowdsourcing made it 'the Wikipedia of its day', and how – as she discovered – quite so many cranks, murderers, perverts and foreigners took such an interest in it.