Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages - Books

Location: Home > Books > General > Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

Similar Items:

•	Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning
•	The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
•	The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
•	The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
•	Netherland: A Novel

Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
An obsessive word lovers account of reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover.

Im reading the OED so you dont have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on...

So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED. The word lovers Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries.

In 26 chapters filled with sharp wit, sheer delight, and a documentarians keen eye, Shea shares his year inside the OED, delivering a hair-pulling, eye-crossing account of reading every word, and revealing the most obscure, hilarious, and wonderful gems he discovers along the way.

Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

"The Letter 'I' Tastes Like It Is Full Of Capers, And I Hate Capers." August 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

The concept of reading the OED cover to cover simply boggles the mind, but Ammon Shea is a unique person: a man so devoted to dictionaries that 21 of the 25 boxes of belongings he brought with him when moving into his latest apartment were full of them. Shea shares with the reader insights both personal and linguistically entertaining throughout the book, and discusses many of his favorite words from the OED.

Some of my favorite words discussed in "Reading the OED" follow.

"Advesperate" means "to approach evening." I join Shea in hoping I never have the need to exclaim "Let's hurry! It's advesperating!"

"Natiform" means "buttock-shaped." I do not know when I will need this word, but I have filed it mentally under the heading "potentially useful."

"Nastify" means "to render nasty." This is a word that has obvious and numerous uses in discussing contemporary culture.

"Peristeronic" means "suggestive of pigeons," and may be my favorite word in the book inasmuch as I cannot imagine a single time I will ever need this word.

"Tricoteuse" is an even less useful word than peristeronic, in that it means "a woman who knits; specifically, a woman who during the French Revolution would attend the guillotinings and knit while the heads were rolling." Now that's cold.

I was also pleased to discover that "chalcenterous" means "having bowels made of bronze," or alternately, "tough." This is a word that I simply must remember and use at every reasonable opportunity.

Shea is clearly a lover of language, and holds lexicographers and linguists in high regard, but he writes for those of us with smaller vocabularies in an amusing and simultaneously educational manner that is never patronizing. Perhaps the best example of this is the discussion on p. 168 where he discusses the difference in technical words with precise definitions (e.g., "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis," a rare lung disease), and the difficulty of defining small, common words, his favorite example of which is "set." The definition of "set" in the OED takes 25 pages, and covers 155 main senses of the word, some of which have up to 70 subsenses. These are truths that are obvious to lexicographers, but are uncommonly recognized outside of professional word-defining circles. These are also the underlying points that make this book so entertaining and worthwhile.

For anyone who loves to read or loves words, this is an absolute necessity. While I doubt I'll ever read the OED, I'm glad that someone has and has written such a clever book about the experience.

5 out of 5 stars

A Good Book about a Great Book August 29, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

The English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote 400 years ago, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." Serious novels and nonfiction works must fall into that "read wholly, and with diligence and attention" part. Dictionaries surely fall into the "read only in parts" category. But no one has told Ammon Shea this. Shea is, among other things, a furniture mover in New York City, but he has a lifetime of being enthralled with dictionaries, and his home is bursting with his collection of them. He isn't a lexicographer (but his girlfriend used to be); he doesn't write dictionaries, he reads them. Ten years ago, he read his first dictionary, the _Webster's New International_, with the result that "My head was so full of words that I often had trouble forming simple sentences out loud, and my speech became a curious jumble of obscure words and improper syntax. It felt wonderful, so I went out and bought the sequel, _Webster's Third New International_." The Everest of dictionary reading would have to be reading the whole Oxford English Dictionary, and Shea has done just that, reporting on the experience in _Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages_ (Perigee). If you are one of the normal people who uses dictionaries like normal people do, this does not sound like it is going to be very interesting, even if it does sound more interesting than actually reading the _OED_ for yourself.

Surprise! With Shea as a guide, this is a fun journey, and as he has said, now he has read the entire _OED_, you don't have to. "The book in your hands," he says, "contains all the words from the _OED_ that I think people would like to know about, if only they didn't have to read the whole damn dictionary in order to find them." Shea's book consists of an introduction and a conclusion, and between them are twenty-six chapters, each devoted to findings within a letter's listing in the _OED_. Each chapter has a short essay, perhaps not associated with that particular letter, in which Shea tells us about the mechanics of his monumental task, the headaches it gives him, the coffee he powers himself with, the other dictionary enthusiasts he has met, his love of interacting with the physical book rather than just researching the electronic _OED_ (a version he admires for other reasons), and his feelings of joy over finding extraordinary words. His selection of words is indeed delightful, and though he is no Ambrose Bierce, he has tinged his comments on them with wit and a little judicious misanthropy. It is useless to try summarize the book's main contents, which are the words and definitions which Shea wants us to think about, and his comments upon them. Here is just one example of a curious word: Acnestis: on an animal, the point on the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched. "I am very glad," he writes, "I found this word early in my reading of the _OED_ - the fact that there existed a word for this thing which previously I had been sure lacked a name was such a delight to me that suddenly the whole idea of reading the dictionary seemed utterly reasonable."

Coming to the end of this book, a reader can enjoy Shea's pleasure at coming to the end of his quest. He has not enjoyed every minute or every page, but he writes lyrically about his enjoyment of the task overall. He explains that the _OED_ is the perfect book for "three a.m. moments", and remarks, "And so three a.m. becomes six, night becomes morning, one cup of coffee becomes four, and the pile of pages shifts from the right to the left as I read my way into the day. In moments like this I am convinced I'll never need another book again." It was, he says, "the most engrossing and enjoyable book I've ever read." The big problem is what to read next? Why, the _OED_ again, only this time he won't push himself to get it done in a year, and without a deadline, he may start at A but he'll let himself get distracted and investigate anything else his reading turns up. Even if you have no intention to imitate Shea, it is a pleasure to read this joyful account of his full absorption in this idiosyncratic task, which might be goofy but is also quietly admirable.

4 out of 5 stars

Another book about OED August 24, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Unlike the other books on or about OED, this one is about a personal, subjective experience. It isn't very 'deep' although it is interesting and entertaining.

5 out of 5 stars

"One would have to be mad to seriously consider such an undertaking." August 24, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Ammon Shea's "Reading the OED" is a paean to the English language, with all of its "glories and foibles, the grand concepts and whimsical conceits that make our language what it is." Shea readily admits that "adding a great number of obscure words to your vocabulary will not help you advance in the world." Although he has been reading dictionaries for a decade in between jobs as a furniture mover in New York City, Shea had never attempted to read the Mt. Everest of dictionaries, the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, with its twenty-one thousand seven hundred and thirty pages and approximately fifty-nine million words. When he made up his mind to tackle this daunting task, he did it with great anticipation and not a little dread. However, he need not have worried that he would come to regret his folly. Not only is the OED an enormously scholarly work, says Shea, but it is also "entertaining and wonderfully engaging." In "Reading the OED," Shea gives us a taste of what it is like to undertake such a monumental project and introduces us to words that are both "spectacularly useful and beautifully useless."

Shea divides his book into twenty-six chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. Every chapter begins with either a riff on the history of dictionaries or a description of the author's feelings and experiences during his year with the OED. For each letter, Shea offers a list of words culled from the OED that are sometimes silly, often unpronounceable, but usually engaging and out of the ordinary. He does not merely define words such as "advesperate," "onomatomania," and "latibulatek," but he also provides comical commentary that will make readers grin and, at times, laugh out loud. Shea is an amusing first person narrator who enjoys poking fun at himself as much as he loves finding remarkable words. He fuels himself with gallons of coffee and closets himself in a library's basement in order to accomplish what some might consider a dubious feat. Shea spends eight to ten hours daily at his "job," and before long, he begins to suffer from eyestrain, pounding headaches, back pain and occasionally, crushing boredom. However, the rewards make it all worthwhile. He is pleasantly surprised at the OED's ability to evoke happiness, sadness, surprise, wistfulness, and chagrin. "All of the human emotions and experiences are there in this dictionary," he insists. "They just happen to be alphabetized." Logophiles (word-lovers) will revel in this breezy, informative, and compulsively readable book.

3 out of 5 stars

There's much more August 6, 2008
2 out of 11 found this review helpful

After you read this, try WORD NERD, too, where you will find 17,000+ interesting words (the author read the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary twice).

Good Grape Wine Company