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Gillpreet Singh Gill

ENG 153 001

Prof. Craig McLuckie

Tuesday, June 4TH, 2019.

Simon Winchester: The Meaning of Everything

The Story of the Oxford Dictionary

Simon Winchester is a British-American author and journalist. Winchester has written

14 non-fiction books and has written one novel. He is the New York Times best-selling author of

the ‘The Professor’ and ‘The Madman’. Winchester was awarded an Order of the British Empire

(OBE) in 2006 for ‘services to journalism and literature’ and was elected an Honorary Fellow of

St Catherine’s College, Oxford. The Meaning of Everything is a non-fiction book. It is mostly

for the old age people. Most of the audience do not want to read it because it is boring.

Winchester serves book as a history of the words in English language. He describes how tricky is

that to make the world’s famous dictionary.

The Meaning of everything which includes everything happened in the past, happens in the

present and will happen in the future which is not meant. The title of the book tells us that

meaning of every word in English language. The author also provides the preface what is in the

dictionary and how the dictionary develops with time and with new words. Simon Winchester

provides the introduction. The content of the book divided into eight chapters. Further, each

chapter arranged into sections. The combination color of book is perfect, white and dark red.

On the book cover, there is a photo of editor and professor James Murray and his colleagues.
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The story of the dictionary begins with the first editor of Herbert Coleridge and professor James

Murray. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Murray was a

talented linguist. He had taught in schools and working in banking. “His pupils adored him and

took great pleasure in his unconventional teaching methods. ‘Dr Murray knows everything’

because a watchword throughout the school. ‘His classes were always intensely interesting’,

wrote one boy” (Winchester, 82). This book was also helped by the dozens of philologists as

volunteer researchers.

In this book, Winchester shows that how people used the pigeons to send the message

to others. But, Murray changed everything with his passion and hardwork. It was so difficult to

find every word and their meanings, synonyms, thesaurus because everything language has

several different meanings for same word. There are many problems for James Murray to

accomplish his dream or complete the dictionary like financially and from dangerous world. As

we know, every problem arises with his solutions. “The solicitous merchant banker Henry Hucks

Gibbs also known for-‘The man who saved the Dictionary’ who loaned money, intervened in

disputes, and generally helped James Murray each time the mercurial editor threatened to resign”

(Winchester, 130).