Ep. 141 Sarah Ogilvie, ”The Dictionary People”

Sarah Ogilvie spent 8 years studying the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Her book is called "The Dictionary People." Ogilvie, who has a PhD in linguistics from Oxford University, studied over 3,000 original contributors to the dictionary. In her introduction to the book, she writes: "I was thrilled to discover not one but three murderers, a pornography collector, Karl Marx’s daughter, a president of Yale, the inventor of the tennis-net adjuster, a pair of lesbian writers who wrote under a male pen name, and a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station lavatory." 

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