Concise Oxford Dictionary

‘Does it have fart ?’ asked my husband, when he saw the centenary facsimile of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (£20). His question reminded me of the woman who looked for rude words in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and then congratulated him on omitting them.

In 1911, when H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler (who was to die in 1918) completed the Concise, they did put in fart, cautioning that it was ‘indecent’. My husband’s enquiry, though, had more point than he knew, for the Fowlers’ first joint enterprise, on moving to adjacent cottages in Guernsey in 1903, was a translation of Lucian. As R.W. Burchfield noted (in his biographical sketch of Henry Fowler, whose Modern English Usage he so judiciously revised), in their translation, ‘in keeping with the spirit of the age, all passages of doubtful decency have been removed’.

Henry Fowler goes scarcely beyond fart in the Concise. The sexually taboo words he naturally blanks. With historical awareness, he annotates piss as ‘not now in polite use’. Shit is ‘not decent’, but, he observes helpfully, is used ‘of or to person as term of abuse’. That has an Edwardian flavour to it, or, under the new king, a Georgian one.

A subsidiary line in the dictionary’s title read: ‘of Current English’. It was important to include new words: top-hole and flapper, motorist and Zionist, ragtime and radioactive. Today, the 1911 Concise is more interesting for the world we have lost. Thus we find an entry for crib-biting: ‘(of horses) habit of seizing manger in teeth & and at same time noisily drawing in breath’.

The Concise drew upon the great Oxford English Dictionary, though before 1911 it had reached no further than R. For illustrations the Fowlers took ‘all possible sources as raw material’, not excluding their own heads — a thing modern lexicographers would scruple at.