Reading for the OED's historical documents reading programme

I became a reader for the OED as a result of a Local History Course run by Kellogg College. We were studying old documents which contained unfamiliar words. Our tutor had heard from Edmund Weiner about the OED on CD-ROM and, thinking this less time-consuming than searching through the printed volumes of the Dictionary, asked him whether he could find some of these unknown words. Several of them were not in the Dictionary, Edmund recognized a potential source, and so was born the Historical Documents Reading Programme.

The programme involved reading printed versions of English texts dating from about 1400 onwards, identifying any words not already in the Dictionary, those in the Dictionary where the spelling was markedly different, and any ante- or post-datings of usage. The texts were mostly wills and inventories, with some court proceedings and civic records, and were from all over England. They include many unfamiliar words which were probably dialect and possibly still current in their own locality. Several of the books contained glossaries and I was able to give the editor's definition of some of the words sent in to the OED.

It was laborious at first, as I hesitated over practically every word other than conjunctions, and pronouns! After a while, a sense of proportion prevailed, and a sixth sense which I cannot explain developed While I read the sentences a mental flag flashed up when a word was new to me, or seemed anachronistic in the context. Often the words were already in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which was what I was working with), but sometimes they were not, and, less often, my finding antedated the example in the SOED. A very satisfactory sense of achievement ensued! This was comparatively easy when a precise date was quoted in the Dictionary, but rather more frustrating when the dating was given as ME. I could cope with OE = Old English, and in my case it hardly ever arose, but ME = Middle English seemed likely to cover a vast period, the parameters of which I could not pin down. So, when in doubt, I sent the word in.

When visiting the University Press Museum, I was intrigued to see that readers of the last century wrote their slips in exactly the same way that I did when I started on the project. All the slips were handwritten, including the citation style for every work quoted, but more recently OUP went through a technical revolution and I received the slips pre-printed, and had only to add the word, date, page, and quotation. Thus I could concentrate on the interesting aspects of the job without the tedium of repetitive copying. My favourite variant spelling was 'quosshion' for cushion (1530), and I learnt about 16th century fabrics when reading inventories of clothiers. The domestic fittings of households was a rich source of vocabulary - bolting which, flagen chair, yeling fat, weggs, and many more. Each area of the country seems to have had its own terminology for the different stages of growth in sheep, cattle, and pigs, and these too produced interesting items for the OED.

For the time being, the stock of relevant printed sources has been exhausted, but I hope more will be found soon so that I can delve once again into the words our ancestors used, and which reflect their activities and concerns.