OED: 75 years and more (continued)

1978 (25 years ago)

By the year of our final snapshot the first two volumes of what was eventually a four-volume Supplement had been published; in 1977 the staff had moved offices again, this time to 37a St Giles (a building now occupied by OUP's other great humanities research project, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Working methods differed little from those of the First Edition: definitions and quotations were still written on slips of paper, bundles of which (still hand-numbered from 1 to 1000) were then passed to the printer, and computers of any kind were not yet in evidence. However, there are significant links between 1978 and the present day. On the staff of the Supplement at that time were several people who still work on the project today; and the main part of the editorial effort, then as now, was concentrated on the early part of the letter P. The non-sexist use of person (in compounds such as chairperson and even henchperson) was exercising the minds of Robert Burchfield and his fellow lexicographers, along with other novelties such as petrodollar and phallocracy.

Sadly, a link with the past was broken in 1978 with the death of Father Henry Rope. In 1903 he had joined Murray's staff, fresh from college, as an assistant; he moved on to other work after a few years, but maintained a connection with the Dictionary for three-quarters of a century by continuing to send in quotations from whatever he happened to be reading - quotations which he scribbled down, rather like Frederick Furnivall, on whatever scrap of paper came to hand. Today's lexicographers are still keying in his quotations, such as the following, which was recently added to the OED database in the entry for paternoster.