27/4 spring booksSC


Oxford English Dictionary Online
Oxford University Press: 2000. Annual
subscription £350+VAT, $550

Walter Gratzer

It was said of Thomas Macaulay that he not
only overflowed with learning but stood in
the slop. This is precisely what happens when
you first uncork the new online-only edition
of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and
allow it to spill a measure of its profligate
riches over your feet. 

The OED, let it be said, is an incomparable
monument of scholarship, one of the 
wonders of our age. I began my exploration 
of its vast territories by checking some 
cherished etymological beliefs, or, as I now
find, misapprehensions. Look up loo for
instance and you find that it is first of all a card
game; the description is detailed enough for
you to be able to sit down to a hand or two
with the characters in works by William
Wycherley or Jane Austen, who cavort in the
quotations. Then again, a loo (Obs. exc. Hist.)
was “a velvet mask partly covering the face,
worn by females in the 17th century to pro-
tect the complexion”. The third loo is “the
name given in Bihar and the Punjab to a hot
dust-laden wind”, and to prove it, there is a
stirring passage from Kipling. And finally, a
loo is indeed “a privy, a lavatory”. Here the
OED is sparing of etymologies, but vouch-
safes that A. S. C. Ross examined possible
sources in 1974 in the October issue of Black-
wood’s Magazine, wherein he concludes that
it derived “in some manner that cannot be
demonstrated from Waterloo”; no gardey loo,
then (the cry of the Edinburgh housewives as
they emptied their chamber pots into the
street from the upper window)? Or even
l’OO, from the two holes in a French privy
door that allowed you to see whether it was
occupied? Alas, it seems not.

Sidling towards science, I wandered at
random among the units of measurement —
pascals, oersteds, newtons, Bohr magnetons,
units SI and units obsolete — the OED
embraces them all. But for a more stringent
test I sought out the eccentric Dent Dictio-
nary of Measurement and found first the unit
of pain, the dol: this the OED effortlessly
defined. Moving a little further from the
beaten track, I challenged it with cran, the
unit for the measurement of herrings, and
was rewarded by the following definition: “A
measure of capacity of fresh herrings as
caught; fixed by the Fisheries Board at 37fi
gallons (about 750 fish)”. “Up to 1815,” the
dissertation continues, “the cran was mea-
sured by heaping full a herring-barrel with
the ends taken out, which was then lifted,

leaving the heap on the ground or floor. In
1816, the Commissioners for the Herring
Fishery fixed the capacity of the ‘cran’ at 42
gallons, Old Wine Measure, which in 1832
was raised to 45 gallons, 42 gallons when
‘pined’ being found insufficient to make a
barrel of bung-packed herrings.” There is
more, not forgetting the quotations. A cran is
also a term (Obs.) for the crane and the
heron. On the other hand, there is no men-
tion of the cran, defined by Hobson-Jobson,
the ebullient nineteenth-century dictionary
of Indian and Malaysian words, as “A mod-
ern Persian silver coin”. The Dent Dictionary
also offers a list of collective nouns: wildfowl
travel in sutes, turtles in dules and jellyfish in
smucks. The OED lists none of these, but it
concedes that a brood of ducks was at one
time a badelyng, and of pheasants a nye.

Did the editors of Dent perhaps make up
the others? Or could they all be usages so far
decayed as no longer to count as words? For
the OED is a living organism, which not only
grows, but also presumably sheds detritus.
The enterprise (originally The New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles) was con-
ceived in this sense by a group of Victorian
scholars in 1857; their plan was to engage
volunteers, allocating to each one a sector of
the English literary and historical landscape
in which to forage. 

In 1878 the Oxford University Press was
finally persuaded that the project had merit,
and chose the redoubtable schoolmaster
James Murray as editor. The task was not

completed until 1928, long after Murray’s
death. It was never the founding fathers’
intent to lay down rules of linguistic usage.
The dictionary was to be authoritative, but
not authoritarian, to observe and describe,
not prescribe. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s
Dictionary (Wordsworth), defined a dictio-
nary thus: “A malevolent literary device for
cramping the growth of a language and mak-
ing it hard and inelastic”. 

The OED has been the very antithesis. It
abjured from the outset any desire to emulate
the French Academy, with its Forty Immor-
tals, who in the eighteenth century saddled
their language with the curse of the circumflex
and even in our time were prepared to instruct
scientists that an enzyme was feminine, when
all French biochemists knew perfectly well
that it was un enzyme. The OED does not
spurn those neologisms that so affront the
guardians of linguistic purity. Thus, as one of
the definitions of hopefully it offers: “It is
hoped (that); let us hope ... orig. U.S. (Avoided
by many authors)”, it cautiously observes.

It is clear that the organism has been
almost continuously updated, with the vari-
ous additions, which followed the majestic
second edition of 1985 in 12 volumes, with
CD-ROM as an option. The new online dic-
tionary is still undergoing revision, a labour
that will take another 10 years to complete. So
far, only M–MAH is finished, and the editors
concede that the OED’s content of science
may still be found in some degree wanting.

Look up scientist, then, and you will 

spring books

NATURE | VOL 404 | 27 APRIL 2000 | www.nature.com 925

Sir James in cyberspace
Let there be public revelry — the OED takes to another dimension.

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© 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd



discover the history of the word from its first
tentative appearance in 1834: an article in the
Quarterly Review laments the fragmentation
of science, as reflected in “the want of any
name by which we can designate students of
the knowledge of the natural world collec-
tively ... some ingenious gentleman proposes
that, by analogy with artist, they might form
scientist ... but this was not generally palat-
able”. In 1840 William Whewell (said to be
the last man to know everything) re-invent-
ed the word and in time it stuck. But 
look down the column of adjoining entries
on your screen and you can find what we
were spared: “Sciencer, Obs. A professor of a
particular science”. And then there is the
magnificent, and much-needed, conceit,
“Scientaster [... after poetaster] A petty or
inferior scientist”, coined by the physiologist
Michael Foster in 1899; a quotation follows
from Foster’s biography of Claude Bernard.

The physical sciences seem to me to do
better on the whole than biology, perhaps
because the corpus of knowledge is less dif-
fuse. Here, under flavour, are the six flavours
of quarks; string theory and superstrings get
crisp definitions; Higgs appears, attached to
boson, field, mechanism and particle; and,
going back a little in time, Debye surfaces
under Debye effect, Debye–Hückel theory,
Debye–Scherrer method, Debye temperature
and Debye unit. Here, too, is buckminster-
fullerene, complete with a quotation from
Harry Kroto in Nature. The besetting fatuity,
still found in many dictionaries, of recording
stoichiometric rather than structural chemi-
cal formulae has been largely but not entirely
expunged, so the peptide melittin from bee
venom comes out as C131H229N39O31 (who
counted?). Sulfur — in the American and
now internationally sanctioned spelling — is
not in evidence. Prefixes for large units do
better than those for small: we find giga- and
tera-, but not atto- and zepto-.

As to biochemistry, all the most familiar
proteins seem to be present and quite a num-
ber of others, although some definitions
(actin for instance) are in sore need of revi-
sion. We have transferrin, ferritin, laminin,
reverse transcriptase, spectrin and ankyrin
even, but no integrin, fibronectin, clathrin, cal-
pain or G-protein. Oncogene and homeobox
are in, but apoptosis is missing and so are T-
cells or T-lymphocytes, genomics and indeed
PCR. In the revised M–MAH sliver, I looked
for and found magainin, first isolated
from the skin of the “clawed toad”
— but Xenopus, I am assured, is not
a toad, but rather a clawed-toed
frog. Missing is MHC (major histo-
compatibility complex), ubiqui-
tous enough, arguably, to qualify
for inclusion. Of course, the
OED does not purport to be a
textbook or encyclopaedia of
science and somewhere must draw
an arbitrary line between the barely useful and

the totally recondite, but among the lacunae
are expressions that a journalist, for instance,
might well want to track down.

The dictionary is diverting on misuses
that have become irretrievably embedded in
common speech. Parameter (first spotted in
a mathematical tract in Latin by one C.
Mydorge in 1631) receives separate defini-
tions in conic sections, crystallography,
mathematics, electricity and statistics, but
also “In extended use: any distinguishing 
or defining characteristic or feature ...”, 
with a quotation, fittingly enough, from New
Sociology (“We would then say that a social 
theory has a human-nature parameter” —
ah, so!). A quantum jump is not only a 
transition between stationary states of a
quantized system, but more especially
“transf., a sudden large increase or advance”,
also now known to politicians and estate
agents as a quantum leap.

The online format of the OED is friendly
and responsive. A click of the mouse will
bring up or hide pronunciation, etymology,
quotations (2.5 million of them and, to my
mind, the greatest treasure of all) and a date
chart showing the development and decline
of usages. You may retrieve quotations from
any one author, and relate them to particular
words; you may bookmark entries and you
may search for your favourite cliché (“sick as
a ...”). If you are unsure of a spelling you can
enter a question mark in the middle of your
word or use an asterisk (wild card) to denote
an undefined number of letters. This will
allow you, if you are so inclined, to play
word-games. So, for illustration, a reader in a
newspaper recently asked whether any words
existed in which a single consonant appeared
three times in tandem. Well, a brief search of
the OED for words of the type, ‘sss’ at once
yielded bossship and one typo.

Today’s science, with its headlong pace of
progress and its ever-shifting frontiers, prob-
ably makes impossible demands of the OED’s
editors, and it will be interesting to see how
they grapple with it between now and 2010.

Meanwhile, we should celebrate a great
and noble assertion of intellectual virtues and
an inexhaustible source of pleasure, to those
at least who can afford to or otherwise get at it.
H. L. Mencken, journalist, lexicographer and
sage, thought that the completion of the first
edition of the OED in 1928 should be marked
in Oxford by public revelry — “military exer-

cises, boxing matches between the dons,
orations in Latin, Greek, English and
the Oxford dialect, yelling matches
between the different colleges, and a
series of mediaeval drinking bouts”. I
fancy I can see the benign shade of Sir
James Murray, surrounded by his
team of indexers, celebrating out in
cyberspace with a small dry sherry. n

Walter Gratzer is at the Randall
Institute, King’s College London, 26–29
Drury Lane, London WC2 5RL, UK.

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926 NATURE | VOL 404 | 27 APRIL 2000 | www.nature.com

When silence is not
a true option
The Woman Who Knew Too Much:
Alice Stewart and the Secrets of
Radiation
by Gayle Greene
University of Michigan Press: 2000. 336 pp.
$35, £19.95

Sunetra Gupta

“Practising medicine without asking these
larger questions is like selling groceries across
the counter,” said Alice Stewart when asked
why, at the peak of a career in clinical medi-
cine, she had decided to abandon it in favour
of practising epidemiology. 

In 1945, the importance of identifying the
risk factors of infectious diseases was becom-
ing obvious, and efforts had already been
made to define and understand the ecologi-
cal processes underlying the spread of infec-
tion. The Institute for Social Medicine had
been established at the University of Oxford
in 1943, reflecting the recognition that it
might also be worthwhile to investigate the
causes of non-infectious diseases such as
cancer. These diseases might have “discover-
able origins in social, domestic, or industrial
maladjustment”, according to the institute’s
founder, John Ryle. Ryle died in 1950, and 
the institute was diminished to the Social
Medicine Unit and its building taken away. 
Stewart, who had been Ryle’s assistant, was
given a readership and made its head with a
budget so small that there was “barely
enough to light a gas fire”. 

It would have been perfectly possible for
Stewart at this time to keep up some sem-
blance of research and devote the rest of her
time to her country garden, not to mention
the lively intellectual circuit in which she had
a singular place as the lover of the distin-
guished literary critic, poet and mathemati-
cian William Empson. However, according
to her biographer, “epidemiological investi-
gation engaged her like a piece of detective
work”, and in 1950 Stewart set about organiz-
ing a retrospective case control study to iden-
tify risk factors for childhood cancer on a
grant of £1,000 from the Lady Tata Memorial
Fund for Leukaemia Research. 

“I spent those £1,000 on railway fares
traveling the length and breadth of England,
going to each public health official, saying
‘here are the questionnaires, will you help?’,”
said Stewart. From this incredible effort
came the startling revelation that a single
obstetric exposure to X-rays significantly
increases the risk of an early cancer death.
The Oxford Survey of Childhood Cancer, as
it came to be known, continued for 30 years,
beyond Stewart’s retirement in 1974. 

She relocated to the University of Bir-
mingham, and found “an empty corridor

© 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd


	Sir James in cyberspace