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Spelling glee
词语的欢乐
In July 1915 an ailing James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word.
1915年7月，《牛津英语词典》的早期编辑之一詹姆斯·默里强撑病躯，给最后一个单词撰写了定义。（注：录音对1915的读音有误。）
He had dedicated 36 years to the dictionary; his toil had taken a toll. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.
他为这本词典奉献了36年的时间，长年的辛劳让他的身体健康付出了代价。默里知道自己看不到词典完成的那天了，于是他写下最后一个词条：“日暮”。
The poetic pathos of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable tales in “The Dictionary People”.
默里生命最后的这段充满诗意、哀伤动人的故事是《编写词典的人》中许多令人难忘的故事之一。
Conceived in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project—“the Wikipedia of the 19th century”—comprising 3,000 people.
编写《牛津英语词典》的构想在1857年提出，是一个规模庞大的众包项目，堪称“19世纪的维基百科”，共有3000人参与其中。
The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time (unlike its “prescriptive” 18th-century predecessor by Samuel Johnson, which told readers how to say and use words).
最初的想法是创建一部“描述性”词典，跟踪记录单词的用法和词义如何随时间而演变(不同于塞缪尔·约翰逊在18世纪编写的“规范性”词典，约翰逊的词典告诉读者单词如何发音和使用)。
Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar” words were used. What is surprising about this fairly random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.
志愿者们进行了广泛阅读，将各种“罕见的、淘汰的、老式的、新式的、奇特的”单词例句邮寄过来。令人惊讶的是，这种相当随意的方法竟然奏效了，因为贡献例句的人数众多而形成了某种秩序。
The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, a former lexicographer who served as an editor for the OED, went into the archives of Oxford University Press and stumbled across an old notebook.
萨拉·奥格尔维这本书的起源故事几乎和词典本身的故事一样离奇。奥格尔维曾是一名词典编纂者，曾担任《牛津英语词典》的编辑。有一天她走进牛津大学出版社的档案馆，偶然发现了一本旧笔记本。
It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. “The Dictionary People” is her work of detective scholarship, evoking the lives behind the names.
这是默里的笔记本，里面记录了词典志愿者的名字和详细信息，其中大多数人都藉藉无名。《编写词典的人》是她的学术侦探之作，再现了这些名字背后的人生百味。
The dictionary’s contributors are an engaging cast, including three murderers, a vegetarian vicar, one of Karl Marx’s daughters and J.R.R.Tolkien. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, aunt and niece, were lifelong lovers and successful writers, who co-wrote plays under a male pseudonym.
词典贡献者的阵容十分有趣，包括三名杀人犯、一名吃素的牧师、卡尔·马克思的一个女儿和J.R.R. 托尔金。凯瑟琳·布拉德利和伊迪丝·库珀是姨甥关系，但两人也是相伴一生的恋人和成功的作家，她们用男性笔名共同写作剧本。
For some, the dictionary was an obsession: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations.
还有一些人对词典无比痴迷：一位贡献者提供了165 061条引文。
Murray, too, was assiduous. He once wrote to George Eliot of “Middlemarch” fame to ask about a word choice in “Romola”, published 17 years earlier. (She responded courteously.)
默里本人也兢兢业业。他曾写信给以《米德尔马契》闻名的乔治·艾略特，询问她17年前出版的《罗慕拉》中的一个选词问题。(她彬彬有礼地给予了回复。)
Yet he also found time beyond his Herculean project to be humane, paying several visits to one contributor imprisoned in Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital.
然而，在完成这一艰巨项目之余，默里还留出时间做了一些仁慈之举，他多次探望了一位被关在布罗德穆尔的贡献者，布罗德穆尔是一所戒备森严的精神病医院。
