OED: 75 years and more (continued)

1928 (75 years ago)

Military exercises, 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.
H. L. Mencken, writing on how he expected the completion of the OED to be celebrated in Oxford; quoted in Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (Viking, 1998)

In the event the festivities were rather more sedate; but the publication of the Dictionary's final section on 19 April 1928 was certainly considered a fit occasion for celebration. OUP began its celebrations well before this: Onions had passed the final sheets for press on 5 January, and the whole issue of the Periodical for 15 February was devoted to the OED, with articles on its early history, on the vast army of volunteers who in one way or another had helped the project on its way, on the chief Editors and other "prime movers", on how the Dictionary's entries were assembled, together with statistics - "414,825 words [...] 178 miles of type, containing approximately 50,000,000 words and 227,779,589 letters and figures, not counting punctuation marks" (!) - extracts from reviews, and even poetry.

Onions had in fact edited the end of the alphabet some years earlier: the fascicle containing the letters XYZ had appeared in 1921. In 1923 - eight years after the death of Murray - Bradley, at work on W, also died, and the remainder of that letter was then divided up between Onions and Craigie, who collaborated on the last fascicle of all, Wise to Wyzen. One of the very last slips to be written, the beginning of the entry for the word worsement, is shown below. The date-stamp, 20 July 1927, is a reminder of the lengthy process of proofreading and correction which lay ahead before the entry would be published. (The handwriting is that of Walter Worrall, whose expertise in drafting the pronunciation, etymology, and definition, acquired in the course of over 40 years as an assistant, is reflected in the fact that his text has not been altered at all by Craigie or Onions.)

The completion of the Dictionary was greeted with a fusillade of congratulatory articles in the national and international press. Both the surviving Editors - together with Arthur Maling, another of the longest-serving assistants - were awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University, and Craigie received a knighthood. But the grandest celebrations of all took place in London on 6 June. OUP can claim to have borne almost the entire cost of producing the OED, which in 1928 was estimated at £300,000; the only exception is due to the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, who in 1905 contributed £5,000 towards the cost of Volume VI. In acknowledgement of this, the official dinner celebrating the completion of the Dictionary was held in the Company's sumptuous Hall, with speeches by the Prime Minister, Craigie, and others.

Lord Oxford once said that if he were cast on a desert island, and could only choose one author for company, he would have the forty volumes of Balzac. I choose the Dictionary every time. [...] Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays - they are all in this one book.
Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister, speaking at Goldsmiths' Hall on 6 June 1928.) (It is worthy of note that the BBC radio programme "Desert Island Discs" was first broadcast in 1942 - although the OED records a 1930 example of "desert-island opera" in the same sense.