Simon Winchester - superb author of many best-selling books including one detailing how the Oxford English Dictionary originated - has written a compelling piece in The Telegraph [in the UK] to commemorate the 1,000,000th word entering the English lexicon the other day:"I've never been without an OED since. I have three complete sets, including one, bound in dark blue leather and titled in gold, that OUP gave me for writing about the history of what someone called "the greatest piece of sensational serial literature ever written". I open it up every day. Each morning I take a randomly selected volume to what the Arabs call "the cave of making" and ponder it for more blissful minutes than I imagine most proctologists would think prudent. But the things I discover, the ammunition I have for the hours of writing ahead! For there seems to be a word for every concept, imaginable and many unimaginable. My favourite for years was "mallemaroking", which an early edition defined as "the carousing of drunken seamen aboard ice-bound Greenland whaling ships", which struck me as a masterly example of hairline linguistic precision. But a later edition of the dictionary slightly amended the definition, dropping the location, trimming it to "the carousing of drunken seamen aboard icebound whaling ships".
Read this delightful piece, in full, here.
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