Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages - Hardcover

Shea, Ammon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399533982 ISBN 13: 9780399533983

Publisher: Perigee Trade, 2008

Synopsis

An obsessive word lover provides an entertaining account of the year he spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover, offering a colorful selection of obscure, hilarious, and offbeat vocabulary gems he discovered along the way.

About this title

About the Author:

Ammon Shea is the author of two previous books on obscure words, Depraved English and Insulting English (written with Peter Novobatzky). He read his first dictionary, Merriam WebsterÂ’s Second International, ten years ago, and followed it up with the sequel, WebsterÂ’s Third International.

From Booklist:

Shea’s engougement (“irrational fondness”) for dictionaries led him to spend a year reading through all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, and he describes this account as “the thinking man’s Cliff Notes to the greatest dictionary in the world.” For each letter of the alphabet he  provides a handful of his favorite words and his own humorous glosses, along with musings on the history of the OED, dictionaries in general, and his reading life. (He does most of his OED reading at the Hunter College Library and finds himself turning into one of those “Library People” as the year goes by.) He shares a number of words that, though they have fallen out of the common vocabulary, could be put to excellent use today: empleomania: “a manic compulsion to hold public office”; zabernism: “a misuse of military authority.” The book will happify (“make happy”) word and dictionary lovers, who will be able to read it in an hour or two, much less time than it takes to read the OED. --Mary Ellen Quinn

About this edition

• Publisher: Perigee Trade
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0399533982
• ISBN 13: 9780399533983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240