The Meaning of Everything：新序言

以下節選自新版The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary一書的序言，該書由西蒙·溫切斯特（Simon Winchester）所著。

Lexicography is among the slowest of callings, and those who labor in the great dictionary headquarters around the world – those 『harmless drudges』 as Samuel Johnson mischievously called them nearly three centuries ago – can be much likened to snails.

詞典編纂是最慢的工作之一，那些在世界各地大詞典總部工作的人——塞繆爾·約翰遜於近三個世紀前戲稱之為「無害的苦工」——其工作進度堪比蝸牛爬行。

You seldom see them moving; and yet, look away and then back, and lo!, they have indeed moved, and have made unexpected progress while your back was turned.

你很少看到進展；然而，轉移目光，再回來，瞧！確實有進步，每次轉身都會發現取得了意想不到的進展。

It is now ninety years since the publication of the twelve volumes of the First Edition ofthe Oxford English Dictionary. It is 163 years since the first London gathering that decided there were 『deficiencies』 in the English dictionaries then available. It is 161 years since poor, sickly Herbert Coleridge hammered together a set of wooden pigeon-holes and began collecting in them the first of the famous 『slips』 on which words, with illustrative quotations submitted by readers all around the world, were to be sorted, eventually to be edited and placed elegantly onto the hundreds, then thousands, of dictionary pages.

自第一版《牛津英語辭典》十二卷出版以來，已經過去了90年。認定英語詞典中存在「缺陷」的倫敦集會自首次召開以來已過去了163年。161年前，貧窮、多病的赫伯特·科里奇將一套木製格架櫃釘在一起，開始收集第一個帶文字的「紙條」，紙條上面寫著世界各地讀者提供的說明性引文，經排序分類，最終被編輯，並被精確地錄入數百、數千張詞典頁上。

Little has changed, either since the nineteenth century in the actual process of word-collection – except, of course, that electronics has made the process very much quicker and more comprehensive than the early editors could imagine. The explosion of computer-based resources available to the eighty staff who now work on the OED – more than at any time in the dictionary』s history – might be thought to have massively accelerated the race to create the Third Edition. But no. Nor would anyone ever be so indelicate as to suggest that a race of anykind is or ever has been underway. The progress continues at an outwardly leisurely pace, slow and steady in the determination to ensure not so much the vastness of the next edition (which they say may be complete in another twenty years) but its exact correctness.

自19世紀以來，收集文字的實際過程幾乎沒有變化，當然，電子業使這一過程比早期編輯所設想的更快、更全面。如今從事OED工作的八十名員工可獲得的計算機資源呈爆炸式增長——比該辭典歷史上的任何時候的資源都要多——或許以為這會大大加速編纂第三版的競賽。並不是的。也不會有人很莽撞地表明這種形式的競賽正在或已經在進行中。這一進展仍舊以一種表面悠閑的速率，緩慢而穩定地進行，以確保新版辭典（他們認為可能會再用二十年完成）不僅範圍廣闊，還要內容精準正確。

Two basic kinds of work dominate. On the one hand there is the revision of the text of 2nd Edition, which was published in 1989; and on the other, the acquisition and defining of entirely new-made words, or new inclusions from abroad into the English word stock. But there is in addition one other feature of great – and new – importance: the injection into all of these entries – thanks to some very clever computational magic – of an immense body of synonyms for every word, synonyms that come from Oxford』s other major lexical achievement of the past fifteen years,The Historical Thesaurus to the OED, and which published in 2009.

主要的基礎工作有兩類。一方面是對1989年出版的第二版文本的修訂；另一方面，收集和定義全新的辭彙，以及從其他語言納入英語詞庫的新內容。此外，還增添了一項很重要也是新的特點：憑藉一些聰明的「計算機魔法」，將每個單詞的大量同義詞都錄入到這些詞條中，這些同義詞來自牛津過去十五年的一些主要詞典成果，如2009年出版的《OED歷史同義詞詞典》。

Take an entry – utopia, say. This (without a capital initial, which specifically relates to Thomas More』s 1516 book of the same title) was initially defined in 1926 for the First Edition, then again in 1989 for the Second and again in 2013 for the Third. But now, if the tiny blue instruction 『Thesaurus』 beside the entry is clicked, so we find on our screens, and with dates of first use, such words and phrases as heaven, land of behest, Cockaigne, eutopia, and El Dorado.

舉例詞條——utopia /烏托邦。該詞（詞首如大寫的形式與1516年托馬斯·莫爾的同名書籍尤為相關）在1926年給出了最初第一版的定義，然後在1989年再次定義，2013年給出第三版定義。但是現在，如果點擊條目旁邊的藍色小指令「同義詞庫」，我們就會在屏幕上看到第一次使用的日期，以及諸如heaven,land of behest,Cockaigne,eutopia和El Dorado等（歷史同義詞的）單詞和短語。

There is also, rather unexpectedly, the phrase horny port – which if you click again brings up two further entries, including that for an 17th century poet named Drummond and his line Dametas dream』d he saw his wife at sport, and found that sight was through the horny port.

此外，還有一個非常意外的短語horny port——如果你再次點擊，就會出現另外兩個條目，包括一位名叫德拉蒙德的17世紀詩人和他的詩句「Dametas dream』d he saw his wife at sport, and found that sight was through the horny port」。

Serendipitous pleasure always one of the great charms of the printed version of the OED, but a pleasure perhaps not readily apparent to users of the electronic version. Now, though, with the addition of the Historical Thesaurus, such pleasing expansions to utopia as horny port can be readily stumbled upon – a realization which even stalwart supporters of the printed book (in which no such discovery could ever be made) will surely now admit.

意外獲得的樂趣一直是OED印刷版的魅力之一，但對於電子版的用戶來說，這種樂趣可能並不明顯。然而，現在由於新增了《歷史同義詞詞典》，偶然也會瀏覽到如utopia擴展的horny port這樣的趣事，現在，即使紙質版（其中沒有任何這樣的發現）的堅定支持者肯定也會這樣認同。

Those on the OED team who perform the work of revision – and they generally work in pairs these days, both to speed things up and to fact-check one another as they go – are now approximately halfway through their labors. The results of this work – updated definitions, ever-earlier citations of a word』s historical use, subtle new senses and meanings – are as a result to be spotted more and more often throughout the book. Fewer and fewer are the occasions when you look for a definition – the word critique, say, chosen at random – only to find beside it a cautionary note: This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1893). Newly revised entries are published online every three months, giving the OED a sprightlier feel to it, as if it has at last managed to unleash itself from the undertow of Victorian times and the drag of Empire.

OED團隊中執行修訂工作的人——目前通常為兩人一組工作，既能加快速度又能彼此核對事實——現在大致正完成一半的工作。這項工作的結果，包括更新的定義、單詞歷史上使用的更早期引用、細微的新含義或詞義，最終會越來越多地在整套辭典中發現。當你查詢某個單詞定義時——比如，隨意選擇一個詞critique——你會越來越少看到其旁邊有一條提示語：此條目尚未完全更新（首次出版於1893年）。每三個月在線發布一次新修訂的條目，這讓OED有種生機勃勃之感，就像它終於成功從維多利亞時代的落後和大英帝國的拖累中解脫出來一般。

Fifteen years ago, when my book,The Meaning of Everything, a history of the making of the OED, was published the English language was a little less substantial than it is today. During the subsequent decade and a half it has been enriched not simply by the discovery of new senses and meanings of existing words, but by the acceptance and entry into the lexicon of entirely new words. And so – do welcome into the language such readily recognizable new comers as Anthropocene, bling, blogosphere and Bluetooth, clickbait and cybersquat, declutter and dot-bomb and Enviropig – and Brexit.

十五年前，當我的書《萬物之意：OED出版史》出版之時，英語還不像今天這般可觀。在隨後的十五年中，它不僅通過發現現有辭彙的新意義和含義，還接收全新辭彙並將其納入得以豐富。所以，歡迎使用像人類世、炫飾、博客圈、藍牙、點擊誘餌、網路搶注域名、大清理、倒閉網路公司、環保豬和英國脫歐這樣容易識別的新詞。

Thus does OED proceed, collecting, revising, defining, searching, and it proceeds truly at a snail』s-pace – a phrase that was first noted as long ago as the early fifteenth century. But look away, just for the blink of fifteen years, and then look back and yes!, you realize: the snail has indeed moved. So much has happened, both to the vast expanse of the English language, and to the great dictionary that records its twists and turns and its endless self enrichment, and the story of which is told in the pages that follow.

因此，OED確定會繼續運行、收集、修訂、定義和搜索，並且真真正正地以蝸牛的速度前行（snail"s pace，該短語最早出現在15世紀初）。不過，你把目光移開，僅15年的眨眼間，再回頭看，瞧！你就意識到：蝸牛確實在行進。無論是對於廣闊的英語語言，還是記錄其迂迴曲折和無限自我豐富的大辭典，以及隨後在書中講述的故事，發生了太多事情。

更多OED出版90周年系列文章，請參閱：

本文內容編譯自牛津英語辭典博客（https://public.oed.com/blog），牛津大學出版社擁有中英文兩版版權。如需轉載，請標明出處。

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