OED: 75 years and more (continued)

1903 (100 years ago)

Moving on another 25 years we find the project utterly transformed. Not only had Murray now moved to Oxford, where he worked in a larger Scriptorium with a much larger team of assistants; there were also two additional editorial teams, working independently on other letters of the alphabet in order to increase the rate of progress. The first independent Editor, Henry Bradley, had joined Murray's team in 1886, and started independent work on the letter E two years later; he was followed in 1901 by William Craigie, and by a fourth Editor, Charles Onions, in 1914.

By 1903 the actual publication of the Dictionary, which had begun with the appearance of the first section (A to Ant) in 1884, was roughly at its midpoint. Sections (also known as "fascicles") were now appearing four times a year; and the prospects for the completion of the project were sufficiently encouraging that a photograph was taken of what appears to be the completed Dictionary.

This photograph, published in 1899 in the Periodical (a promotional magazine published by OUP), shows the OED (still at this point entitled A New English Dictionary) as it was then expected to look. All ten volumes are credited to the editorship of Murray and Bradley; by 1899 both Craigie and Onions were already at work on the Dictionary as assistants, but neither had yet been appointed Editor. The later volumes are also shown as far thinner than they eventually proved to be: the ninth and tenth volumes were in fact each divided into two parts.

I have met people who knew nothing about Dictionaries; they knew only that there was a book called "The Dictionary," just as there is a book called the Bible, another called the Prayer-book, another the Koran; when they saw or heard a word that was new to them, they wondered if it was "in the Dictionary" [...] That there are dictionaries and dictionaries, or that, sad to say, dictionaries differ, had not yet dawned upon their apprehension. But of late years the merits and excellencies of rival dictionaries have been thundered upon us by daily papers from The Times downward, so loudly and so long, that the number of these ingenuous people must be greatly diminished.
James Murray, in a lecture on "Dictionaries" given at the Royal Institution on 22 May 1903

With the appointment of Craigie as Editor the OED also acquired another new home. In 1901 he and Bradley, and their staffs, started work about a mile away from Murray's Scriptorium, in the ground floor of the Old Ashmolean Building (now the Museum of the History of Science, next to the Sheldonian Theatre). The earliest known photograph of what became known as the "Dictionary Room", probably taken around 1915, is shown below. Bradley and Craigie are seated at the front desks on the right of the picture; between them, two desks further back, is Onions.