I was reading Prof. Anatoly Liberman's Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone, OUP, 2005, p. 100, when I ran across: "Charles P G Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, wrote what ammounts to a book (three papers, about 250 pages, featuring approximately 350 words) on misdivision [i.e., meta-analysis, e.g., a nadder vs an adder]." Here was a name I was unfamiliar with. I flipped to the endnotes, on p 271: "Scott was an active supporter of reformed spelling, which accounts for the odd appearance of his titles. All three articles are called the same: "English Words which hav Gaind or Lost an Initial Consonant by Attraction." They were published in the Transactions of the American Philological Society 23 (1892): 179-305; 24 (1893): 89-155; and 25 (1895): 83-139." Well, I have always been a connoisseur of doomed English spelling reforms, so I plugged Mr Scott's name and double middle initials into Google. And, what should pop up second, but a link to a newsletter describing the inaugural meeting of the Simplified Spelling Society. There was Mr Scott meeting with the likes of Frederick James Furnivall, co-creator of the OED, and Walter W. Skeat, etymologist and first president of the Simplified Spelling Society. It's a great site, well worth a visit. I met Professor Liberman once at one of the annual UCLA Indo-European Conferences. (We sat next to one another at dinner and discussed etymology while eating Persian delicacies.) He blogs also.

Here's a list of books about dictionaries which I've read and found enjoyable:

Green, Jonathon. 1996. Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made. A nice readable history of dictionaries.

Landau, Sidney. 1985. Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography. A nice history also.

Murray, K. M. Elisabeth. 1977. Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. I discovered the OED in my high school library, and a friend's mother gave me this book soon thereafter as a birthday present. His granddaughter wrote this biography of James Murray, the editor of the OED.

Willinsky, John. 1994. Empire of Words: the Reign of the OED. A critique of the OED and its authority.

Winchester, Simon. 1998. The Professor and the Madman: a Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the OED. A fascinating history of a mad American who was placed in an asylum after having shot and killed a random Londoner on his way to work. He was one of the many volunteer readers for the OED, and he sent in the most citations slips of the lot.

---. 2003. The Meaning of Everything: the Story of the OED. I haven't read this one yet.

Zgusta, Ladislav. 1971. Manual of Lexicography. A very thorough, very academic book on the subject of lexicography. A tough read but worth the effort, if you love words and word-hoards (i.e., dictionaries).

[fixed a typo and a mistake]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Interestingly, a little over a year ago I read about Anatoly Lieberman in one of Nathan Bierma's language columns and invited him to our board. He said he looked at it and was impressed, but didn't have time to post with us. We had a very nice discussion, and at the time I had been obsessing on "epicaricacy," so I asked him about it. I just found that old email, and here was his answer:

"SCHADENFREUDE appeared in German at the end of the 16th century as an
attempt to gloss a Latin word from Seneca (actually, SCHADENFROH preceded
the noun). Bailey's monster must have been his own creation, and Murray's
policy was not to include stillborn words that occurred in dictionaries but
were never used by normal human beings. I am sure this is the reason
EPICARICACY did not find its way into the OED."

I see Professor Liberman and I agree on two points: the origin of German Schadenfreude and the probability that the word epicaricacy occurs first with, not really Bailey, but one of his dictionary's succeding editors. I finally got my Shipley Dictionary of Early English, which, I am pretty sure is where Mrs Bailey got her entry from. He says he found it in Bailey's later edition, too, 1751.