Scrabble

Having lost a recent game of Scrabble, I was moved to look up 'zoom', one of the words responsible for my loss. Was it really permitted? Should I have challenged it?

Crack out the last volume of OED, the over-size one that is three and a half inches thick that does the letters V-Z. I think someone must have dropped it from a height at some point as the opening pages are rather bashed about and the covers have started to come adrift from the pages. What happens when you try to save money by having one volume when you should have had two. As it is, what we have is Volume X, Part II, so an entire Volume X would have been huge, quite impractical. One can only suppose that the word volume does not mean quite the same thing for dictionary compilers as it does for the rest of us.

While page numbers restart at one on a regular basis. They clearly have some special meaning too. So I work my may through to 'zoom' on one of the pages 101, to find that 'zoom' only rates a small head word and less than two column inches of text. A very small fish in the OED pond. A word described as echoic and with usage 1 from the late nineteenth century being as an intransitive verb about low pitched humming or buzzing. So the word is just about allowed; at the margins. Meaning 2, rather closer to modern usage, is described as aircraft slang and is not allowed. But BH would have survived any challenge.

Moving forward, I find 'zyme' on the very last page, a full-sized head word which might prove useful in the future. And the very last full-sized word of all is 'zymurgy', the business of fermentation, as in beer, cider, wine and so forth. Then just a column inch of odds and ends.

As can be seen from the snap above, C. T. Onions was the editor for the letters X, Y and Z. In the preface he explains that 'X' and 'Z' words are mainly foreign, while 'Y' words are  mainly Germanic. Including a lot of short and ancient monosyllabic words such as yard, year and yell. While in old English 'y' was a verbal prefix, as in 'yclept'. I believe there still are languages around which stick grammatical markers on the front of words, rather than on the back, which is the more or less universal practise in western Europe now.

The book as a whole is dated 1928, while this preface is dated 1921. But Onions tells us that the materials were gathered by a voluntary subeditor, one Reverend J Smallpeice, back in 1882-4, and that the proofs were read by the Misses Edith and Thomson and two others. Various other people, some less obscure, provided assistance of one sort or another - not least the secretary of the British Xylonite Company.

Bing does not appear to have heard of the subeditor, but Google turns up a school log book which records the death of someone of his name, a rector, in May 1900. Quite probably, I would have thought, the chap in question. While the school has probably morphed into the place at reference 2.

With St. Mary's Church up a lane a couple of hundred yards away. One supposes that back in those days, rectoral duties were quite light. Parsons were not expected to function as one man social services departments: a bit of visiting yes, a bit of uxorial marmalade yes, but also plenty of spare time for collecting beetles or whatever. In this case, words.

No doubt Gemini would have jumped to conclusions and reported these two Smallpeices as one and the same person, without any kind of qualification - until one poked him. But time for breakfast now.

References

Reference 1: A new English dictionary on historical principles: Founded mainly on materials collected by the Philological Society - edited by Murray, Bradley, Craigie and Onions - 1928. Originally dedicated to Queen Victoria, but presented to King George V on its completion by the Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford. Otherwise the OED.

Reference 2: https://www.meppershallacademy.org.uk/web.