The Tory xenophobes who police our coasts should watch their words. The so-called English language is actually a multicultural hubbub, jumbling together classical derivations, Anglo-Saxon roots, local dialect, fancy continental imports, and souvenirs of further-flung territories: the innocuous term “breeze”, for instance, is borrowed from Portuguese colonists in India, who used it to define a cooling afternoon wind in the tropics. English is happily borderless, and the same is true of the Oxford English Dictionary which, as Sarah Ogilvie says, set out in the mid-19th century to trace words back to “their natural habitat”, wherever that may be.
Officially, the first headquarters of the OED was an iron shed in a north Oxford garden, grandly designated a “scriptorium” by the lexicographers who toiled inside it, often solemnly costumed in academic gowns and mortar boards. But from the beginning this was a crowdsourced project, and Ogilvie, tracking down leads from an address book kept by one of the earliest editors, has unearthed hundreds of anonymous volunteers on all five continents who collected recondite words or trawled unreadable books for illustrative quotations.
