Ammon Shea has already read other dictionaries. This time, he decides he will read the mother of all dictionaries, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (specifically, the 1989 print edition). This book chronicles his adventures reading, from A to Z. Each chapter, named after the letters of the alphabet, begins with his experiences reading the OED and ends with his favorite words from that letter, a definition, and his reflection of the word. The humorous narration and commentary on words and language made me laugh out loud while I was reading. I enjoyed this book thoroughly, and recommend it to anyone who loves words or dictionaries. ( )

Reading the OED is a bit difficult to describe. It is the story of a man who spent a year reading the entirety of the Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes and nearly 22,000 pages) and in that way it is a memoir of a year spent immersed in the English language's largest dictionary. Reading the OED is also the vehicle by which author Ammon Shea shares the hidden gems he found while reading the immense dictionary, words like psithurism (the whispering of leaves moved by the wind) and inadvertist (one who persistently fails to take notice of things). Shea's comments on these words (sometimes snarky, sometimes not) are memorable and it is his personality that makes Reading the OED such a great read.

While reading Reading the OED will do nothing to inspire one to undertake Shea's great task (his list of reading-inspired complaints will surely dissuade even his biggest fans), it will pique one's interest in lexicography (dictionary-writing) and in words in general. Checking the OED's word of the day may become habit. As Shea and that may lead to browsing the print or online versions, for as Shea relates, the OED “tickles the familiar, telling me once again about words that I’ve known for years and forgotten that I forgot. It tells me things that I know I knew about words, but with additional insights that I have blithely ignored over the years. And it tells me things about words that I never could have imagined on my own” (96).

Some of my favorite words featured in Reading the OED are keck (to make that cat-coughing-up-a-hairball noise), petrichor (the smell after the rain), and of course psithurism mentioned above. ( )

Read this while in line to vote, got some strange looks.... but nobody else was smart enough to bring a book so they just had to stand there while I was reading about fantastic words! ( )

Once in a while there comes a book that seems to have been written about you. It speaks to you, it describes you, it knows you. For me, Reading the OED is that book.

Yes, I am one of “them”. A word-nerd. One of those odd people who enjoy reading dictionaries. I’ve done it since I was a child, and I still take immense pleasure in it today. Knowing that there are others not only like me, but admittedly even battier about dictionaries than I am was a pleasant revelation.

Reading the OED is well-written, entertaining, informative, and utterly delightful. My only gripe is that the book is too short. Guess this will be the final prod I need to actually go out and buy the 20 volume set of the OED I’ve been coveting for years… ( )

The author set out to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary in one year. The OED, Shea explains, is not just a dictionary; with its etymologies and usage examples from great literature, it also recapitulates the entire history of the modern English language. And it is fairly thorough: in its 21,730 pages it features fifty-none million words, “give or take a few thousand.” The letter S takes up four volumes alone – more than 3,000 pages. The most recent print edition fills twenty volumes and weighs 137.72 pounds.

Shea loves his dictionaries. He arrays them along his wall, “all dust-jacketed in dark blue, with a regal and chitinous gloss, resembling the covering of some beautiful and wordy beetle.” When reading them, he claims to find “the entire range of emotions and reactions that a great book will call forth from its reader … they just happen to be alphabetized.”

The chapters are organized alphabetically, with a brief survey of word selections from that letter in the OED preceded by some background notes and an accounting of how the author is surviving the reading process. He supplements his selection of favorite words and their definitions with his own elucidations, such as these entries:

Accismus (n.) An insincere refusal of a thing that is desired.
As in: “No, please, I really would like for you to have the last donut.”

Mythhistory (n.) A mythologized account of history.
In other words, history.

What is the longest entry in the print version of the OED? It turns out to be the word set, which has 155 main senses as a verb, nine as an adjective, 48 as a noun, and one as a conjunction. In the online version, make is the largest entry (because of the greater ease of electronic updating). Shea also makes the interesting observation that the letter W is qualitatively different than other letters: since there is no such letter in ancient Latin, the vocabulary of W is overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. He notes that reading W is like reading another dictionary!

I had high hopes for a book that begins with “Exordium (Introduction),” but ultimately I was disappointed. The author’s wit at the beginning of the book gives way to a litany of complaints including headaches, blurry vision, endless cups of coffee, and jeremiads against people who talk when he is trying to read. An inordinate number of his word commentaries have to do with how obnoxious other people’s children are.

I would give the book 3 stars out of 5. If nothing else, it may help cure you of onomatomania (vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word). ( )