In the 1870s, quotation slips needed for the “P” section of the Oxford English Dictionary were found being burned in a Cavan stable
In the 1870s, quotation slips needed for the “P” section of the Oxford English Dictionary were found being burned in a Cavan stable
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Work on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) began in 1857 and was not fully published until 1928. To document examples of word entries in written use, volunteer readers copied passages from thousands and thousands of books that illustrated word usage onto quotation slips. These slips were then posted in for the OED editors to organise and review – beginning with the first editor, Herbert Coleridge, who started with 100,000 of these slips in his gaff.
The number of slips quickly grew into the millions, and many were misplaced or lost. The quote in this post’s image, from Simon Winchester’s “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary”, provides an account of how the slips corresponding to entries beginning with “Pa-” ended up as kindling in County Cavan.
Further reading:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/523939/time-oxford-english-dictionary-forgot-word
> Every day, volunteers mailed in thousands of small strips of paper called “quotation slips.” On these slips, volunteers would copy a single sentence from a book, in hopes that this sentence could help illuminate a particular word’s meaning. (For example, the previous sentence might be a good example of the word illuminate. Volunteers would copy that sentence and mail it to Oxford’s editors, who would review it and compare the slip to others to highlight the word illuminate.)
I always found this fascinating! I can’t imagine the amount of work it took to complete.