Pippa Bailey explores the fascinating business of defining a word.
The Oxford English Dictionary remains, in many ways, a Victorian phenomenon, born in an era of remarkable innovation: of railways and steelworks, anthropology and anaesthesia, Charleses Dickens and Darwin. It is difficult, now, when the thought of consulting a paper dictionary seems so analogue, to grasp how audacious it once was to try to capture, for the very first time, every word and make it tell its story.
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