After graduate school, I treated myself to a full set — that's 20 very large and heavy volumes — of the Oxford English Dictionary for my home office. It was a very on-brand purchase for me, and also a wildly impractical thing to own, as I am reminded every time I move. But where else can I flip through at random and discover that not only is the word "indeedy" (originating in the U.S., "used as an emphatic affirmative or negative") in the OED, its first documented instances originated in an 1856 volume of The Knickerbocker (or, New-York Monthly Magazine) — "Yes, indeedy" — followed swiftly by Mark Twain's 1872 book "Roughing It," with "No indeedy" this time?
How does an American colloquialism like this — I'm not sure I would have known it to be an actual unique word, and not simply a little flourish of noise Ned Flanders favored to make it sing, without the OED — make it into an Oxford dictionary? Now that I've read Sarah Ogilvie's surprising and delightful new book "The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary," I can imagine James Murray, the venerable Dictionary editor, reading a slip of paper mailed to his Scriptorium, perhaps by a volunteer in the U.S., documenting the appearance in print of this folksy expression.
