Quotable quotes

In further celebration of the OED's 75th anniversary, the quotations given below are some of those collected for amusement by the staff of the First Edition, a selection of which were reprinted in the Periodical of 15 February 1928.

Some of the quotations were re-appropriated as comments on the OED itself:

Heaps of huge words uphoorded hideously,
With horrid sound though having little sence.

1591 Spenser Teares of the Muses (quoted in OED s.v. hideously

Others seemingly refer to the nature of the lexicographers' work:

Niceness in wordes was always counted the next step to trifling.
A man may be counted a vertuous man, though he haue made many slips in his life.M

1611 Bible (Translators' Preface)

The writer of a dictionary rises every morning like the sun to move past some little star in his zodiac; a new letter is to him a new year's festival, the conclusion of the old one a harvest-home.

1848 tr. J. P. F. Richter Levana

Some were taken as descriptive of the staff:

Thou hast men about thee, that vsually talke of a Nowne and a Verbe, and such abhominable wordes, as no Christian eare can endure to heare.

a1616 Shakespeare 2 Hen. VI

The Museum Ashmoleanum is adorned within with a noble collection of natural Curiosities.

1722 J. Macky Journey through Eng.

...or simply...

They are strange beings, those Lexicographers.

1858 J. Brown Horæ Subsecivæ