#1199 1857 · Oxford English Dictionary (Philological Society, later James Murray) · Publishing / lexicography
The Oxford English Dictionary was built by mailing the reading job to unpaid volunteers
the problem
No dictionary documented every word's history, and no publisher could pay staff to read all of English literature
background
In 1857 the Philological Society of London resolved that every existing English dictionary was inadequate: none traced a word's meanings historically through dated, sourced quotations showing how usage had actually changed over centuries. Doing that properly meant reading virtually the whole of printed English literature, tracking down the first and most representative use of every sense of every word, a reading task so large that no institution could staff it with employees. A small paid team might manage a few hundred books; the project needed tens of thousands.
The Society's answer was to not hire the labor at all. It asked the reading public itself to donate the work: ordinary readers, assigned particular books, would copy out any sentence illustrating an interesting or unrecorded word onto a slip of paper and mail it in, with no pay and no requirement beyond a love of language and access to a library. James Murray, who took over as editor in 1879, relaunched the appeal on a far larger scale, distributing lists of specific books and specific wanted words through newspapers, libraries and the journal Notes and Queries.
what everyone would do
The only obvious path was to hire more lexicographers and readers, which meant either scaling back the dictionary's ambition to what a small paid staff could actually read, or accepting a project timeline and budget no publisher of the era could sustain.
what they saw
Murray saw the scarce resource wasn't lexicographic skill, which only editors needed, but reading hours, which thousands of literate people already had and would give away for a well-defined task.
the move
The Society, and later Murray, published open appeals asking any interested member of the public to read assigned books and mail in quotation slips — dated, sourced sentences illustrating a word's usage — building the dictionary's evidentiary base from unpaid volunteer reading rather than a hired research staff.
why it works
Splitting the impossible task of reading all of English literature into thousands of tiny, self-contained assignments — one volunteer, one book, slips mailed in as found — meant the project's total capacity scaled with the number of volunteers recruited rather than the number of salaries it could afford. Because each slip only needed a sentence, a source, and a date, quality control at the editing desk was enough to catch errors without needing to train or supervise the readers themselves, so recruitment could stay wide open to anyone willing to read.
the payoff
Murray's appeal drew 1,000 slips a day; by 1928 volunteers had supplied most of the OED's quotations, with 140,000 slips left unused.
where it breaks
It needs a task that decomposes cleanly into small independent units a novice can complete correctly without training, a way to verify submissions cheaply at the point of assembly rather than trust each contributor, and a pool of people who find the work itself rewarding enough to do unpaid; a resource requiring specialized judgment on every unit, or one where errors are costly and hard to catch centrally, won't survive being crowdsourced this way.
what came after
The volunteer-slip model made the OED's historical scope possible at all and became the template other historical dictionaries later copied, including crowd-sourced quotation drives for the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Middle English Dictionary, which inherited leftover OED slips.
references
- [1]The history of the OED AppealsOxford University Press (OUPblog), 2012blog.oup.com
- [2]Reading and readers — Examining the OEDUniversity of Oxford, 2019oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk