The Oxford Quarto Dictionary

Abstract

Oxford lexicography at the beginning of the 20th century was dominated by the OED. This work, based on the analysis of vast quantities of historical evidence, represented the acme of 19th-century scientific philological scholarship which was to give birth to the academic discipline of linguistics. Many educated people at the time, however, were opposed to the descriptive analysis of language, especially given the declining standards of literacy they frequently identified in newspapers and elsewhere. In the 1920s, Oxford University Press planned a dictionary that would straddle these two positions, and persuaded H. W. Fowler to take on its editorship. The ‘Quarto’ dictionary, as it was first called, was to be an innovative work which would combine scholarly lexicographical method with judicious information on usage, at the same time drawing on great works of English literature as its sources. After many years of labour, the project was aborted in 1958 (Fowler having died in 1933). Its early stages and eventual demise, as revealed in papers in the archives of Oxford University Press, illustrate the clash between prescriptivism and descriptivism (still alive today) in language matters, and the increasing irrelevance, to both dictionary users and makers, of literary example.