The Lex Luther

Now that's Impressive - call or click today to enlarge. Well, click, anyway.


In one of the most memorable chapters in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), the essayist 





and social critic Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) describes in vivid detail the formative impress upon him, while growing up in the 1870s and 1880s, of the bound volumes on his father's shelves of the leading monthly cultural periodicals of the day, especially Harper's and the Century, whose closely-printed, austere dual columns, handsomely illustrated by intricate woodcuts, were chockablock with eagerly-awaited serial installments of the latest works of some of the era's leading English novelists, divers reprints from foreign journals, stately surveys of noted chapters from American and world history, and long travelogues from lands that the nation's Gilded Age moneyed class had set about to assay with an impetus that, in a harbinger of that pax Britannica turned steadily Americana in the wake of two world wars, would see the hallowed Encyclopædia Britannica itself move from the green quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge to Chicago.


The New York monthly the Century, the news-rack offshoot of an eponymous book publisher like Harper's and many other such journals (eventually, in its case, the Appleton-Century-Crofts familiar to every grammar-school child sentenced, as it were, to heed the bibliographical niceties), had as its crowning glory the publishing over 1889-1891 of one of the finest and most-admired works of general reference ever commissioned in America, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, second among its exhaustive kind only to its near-contemporary The Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928), and in a number of respects a worthy bridge in its variant scope between the latter and that summa of pre-WWI scholarship, the great Eleventh Edition, from 1910-1911, of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Where the OED took as its founding remit the hairfine tracings of etymological evolution, via the painstaking accumulation of usage examples through the centuries, the Century incarnated a pragmatist hunger to compass the ongoing explosion of scientific, taxonomic and all other technical terms marking that most expansive of centuries approaching its confident close, with an eye to clarity, precision and currency of definition, and, not least, a felt imperative, prescient as it would turn out, to stamp itself with the impress of that specifically and newly American engagement with the world at large, in which the American version of English would, over the century to come and now beyond, become the closest thing, not excepting the learned Latin of centuries past, to a lingua franca that the world had yet seen.





The scholar chosen to edit the The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia could hardly have been equalled, let alone bettered. William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) of Yale* was the country's preeminent scholar of general linguistics, a world expert in Sanskrit ever since his graduate years in the 1850s under the leading German scholars of the day, and a man who had cut his lexicographical incisors a quarter-century earlier in a key role in the revision of that literal Noah's ark-a-media, Webster's American Dictionary. Among the hundreds of scholars working under Whitney in the drafting of definitions and usage examples were the noted conservationist Gifford Pinchot, and the pragmatist philosophers Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey. 





The results filled over 7,000 pages, and, depending on binding and edition, in from six to ten volumes, with over 500,000 entries - and, not least, featured over 7,500 stunning, intricate woodcuts and engravings of the sort long familiar to readers of the late-C19 Harper's, many of them by the young Ernest Thompson Seton, the great wildlife artist, author, and Scouting pioneer.**


After the death of Whitney in 1894, his assistant Benjamin Eli Smith oversaw the addition of The Century Cyclopedia of Names, and, in 1897, The Century Atlas, followed by several reformatted editions and uniform reprintings inclusive of the two newer works, through 1914, after which no revisions or expansions would appear, though an evolving abridgement, The New Century Dictionary, appeared in editions from 1927 through the early 1960s.


The various formats of the original 1889-1991, though, much like the diaspora of Eleventh Edition Britannicas, remained prized items in the second-hand market ever after. 


In 2000, Jeffery A. Triggs, a tech-savvy alumnus of both the Oxford English Dictionary and AT&T Labs, decided from his expertise that the Century was the one great work of American reference in the public domain worthy of web conversion in the grand manner, and so commenced to beat the drums online and among his industry friends in search of interest, of solutions to the oft-daunting technical requirements for resolution and ease of use, and of the funding necessary to bear their fruit. In 2001, thanks to friends at Root Technologies of Princeton, New Jersey, that interest, those solutions and that funding all came through at last, and after many nights of painstaking work at home with his wife and daughter on his iMac, and carefully-packed shipments to and from Princeton of sheaves of scan-ready pages from the original, 





the whole of the fully-searchable Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia made its triumphant web debut in a format worthy of its birth and reputation - and in a fraction of the time that Triggs had feared that the project, in the absence of his angels, would threaten to demand:


A number of people have asked us why we have gone to all this trouble to put a hundred-year-old dictionary on the World Wide Web. The answer can be summed up in three words: it's free, it's big, and it's beautiful.


... In a way The Century Dictionary can be considered the Titanic of dictionaries, fabled in its day as the largest, most comprehensive dictionary yet completed. (In fact, with one exception, it is still the largest English language dictionary in existence.) ... Indeed, The Century Dictionary is still considered by many scholars to be the greatest American dictionary of all time.


... As I mentioned above, no dictionary is everything to everybody, and The Century Dictionary Online is no exception. You will not find terms like "bad hair day," "ribbit," "Rogernomics," or even "Reaganomics" here. After all, the last edition of The Century Dictionarycame out when Reagan was a toddler. More seriously, you will not find terms like "AIDS," "motherboard," "television," "World Wide Web," and even some common words I have used here. Dictionary publicists always like to emphasize their new words, but we cannot hide the fact that The Century Dictionary Online, advanced as it was in its day, has no newer words yet. However, this should not obscure the more important fact that the vast majority of English words, and virtually all the words of the core vocabulary of English, were already known more than a century ago and are in fact beautifully, deeply defined in The Century Dictionary. The online interface, which allows the instantaneous traversal of thousands of pages in many volumes, may disguise for some users just how large this dictionary really is, how very much is here. It is quite simply the largest, most comprehensive dictionary freely available on the World Wide Web. Furthermore, its American orientation (excellent American pronunciations, preference given to American spelling forms, attention to words of American origin) gives it a special relevance in our time. When it was first published, it was hailed as a glory of American scholarship, yet at that time it was not at all obvious that American English would emerge, as it has in the past century, as by far the most important variety of English. 


To return at last to the premise with which this little preface began (in our beginnings, after all, we may find our ends), we created The Century Dictionary Online because it is free, it is big, and it is beautiful. I should add finally, a couple of more reasons: married to DjVu technology, it is innovative, and perhaps most important, it is still an American treasure.

*Here is The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) on Whitney:


The greatest English-speaking student of general linguistics and of the science of language, William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894), was born at Northampton, to a fine local and family tradition of manners, character, and scholarship ...


... when he came to the making of The Century Dictionary, he conceived it as bound to offer, not a standard of “correctness” derived from classical periods in the past, but a compendium of the actual use and movement of the word throughout its history. Together with this kinetic conception both of the vocabulary and of the semantics of his Dictionary, Whitney gave the most minute attention to his etymologies and definitions. Among the editors of Webster’s Dictionary in 1864, Whitney and Daniel Coit Gilman had had special charge of the revision of the definitions; for the CenturyWhitney obtained the assistance of his brother Josiah in defining the technological words, and the assistance of other experts in their special fields. The result was an extensive vocabulary intensively defined. The etymologies are brought up to the state of knowledge in 1891. The quotations (undated) illustrate rather than fully set forth the semantic history of the word; the Century in this respect is surpassed by the Oxford Dictionary, to which alone among English dictionaries it is in any respect second.   

Whitney’s own writing is a model of lucid exposition. It neither has nor needs adventitious ornament; it does not even need the play of humour to make his most technical essays readable. There are to be sure, flashes of a polemic wit, but what keeps the text alive and at work is the reader’s sense that he is in powerful hands that bear him surely along. Whitney seems to divine that particular analysis of his material which will carry the reader cleanly through it. The ultimate impression left by his writings is that of a powerful intellect controlling enormous masses of fact and moving among them as their master. To be interesting, such power needs no play other than its own.***

To read the article about William Dwight Whitney in The Century Cyclopedia of Names, click here. To read Richard W. Bailey's article on Whitney from xrefer, click here. To read The Atlantic Monthly's extensive obituary tribute to Whitney (March 1895), click here.

**See "Why and How the Great Dictionary Was Made." the captivating, lavishly-illustrated advertising supplement for the work that appeared in an early 1892 number of the Century:

Another most important and pleasing part of the book, the pictorial, has been allowed to speak for itself as this notice has proceeded. Of its quality here are examples; its quantity amounts, to be very precise, to 7521 cuts.

We have not been able even to mention the purely mechanical side of the work, the practical methods devised for handling, distributing, and preserving the collected material, in which there is much that is interesting. What has been said may give the reader some idea of the object of the book, and of its spirit, its methods, and its magnitude. The labor it involved and the difficulties which were conquered in its making will, perhaps, by and by appear in the literary history of the last days of the nineteenth century, of which The Century Dictionary is at least the most conspicuous monument.


***Cf. the Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter on the work of the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in critiquing erroneous theories of interest:


...With a minimum of effort, following the straightest possible line, and with the most graceful elegance, he dispatches one theory after another; and--after having carefully exposed the cause of the disaster--he continues on his way without losing another word, or indeed without saying one word too many. There is no book from which one could learn better how to seize firmly on the essentials and how to ignore the irrelevant.