Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). For those unfamiliar with dictionary hierarchy, the OED is the king of dictionaries. It is the dictionary. It’s a also a big dictionary. The second edition, which Shea consumed, was published in 1989 in 20 volumes. It weighs 137 pounds and is 21,730 pages long!
Shea read the whole thing and recounts his experience in his book, Reading the OED One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, which was published by Perigee earlier this month.
Shea will be blogging weekly for the next few months over at the Oxford University Press blog “about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience” He took extensive notes in a blank nineteenth century daybook he acquired from a used book dealer in Massachusetts. The daybook contained “500 enormous pages of clean old paper that had been waiting patiently for well over a hundred years for someone to come along and write on them. In it I wrote all the words that I came across that I liked, or the things about which I had questions, or any thoughts that I had about the dictionary as I read it.”
This tremendous accomplishment allows Shea immediate entry to both the Logophile Hall of Fame and The Attention Span Hall of Fame. I also wonder if he might be the first man with OCD to read the OED!
Shea’s first post at the OUP blog, Keeping Notes