Henry Bradley, FBA (3 December 1845 – 23 May 1923) was a British philologist and lexicographer who succeeded James Murray as senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). [1]
Bradley had humble beginnings as a farmer's son in Nottinghamshire, but by adolescence, he was already steeped in several languages of Classical learning, and he is supposed to have learned Russian in only 14 days. Simon Winchester records that some of Bradley's childhood notebooks, discovered by a friend, contained
...lists of words peculiar to the Pentateuch or Isaiah, Hebrew singletons, the form of the verb to be in Algerine, Arabic, bardic and cuneiform lettering, Arabisms and Chaldaisms in the New Testament, with vocabularies that imply he was reading Homer, Virgil, Sallust and the Hebrew Old Testament at the same time. In another group the notes pass from the life of Antar ben Toofail by 'Admar' (apparently of the age of Haroun Arrashid) to the rules of Latin verse, Hakluyt and Hebrew accents, whereupon follow notes on Sir William Hamilton and Dugald Stewart and a translation of parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus ...
For a long time, he was employed as a correspondence clerk for a cutlery firm in Sheffield. The first public outlet for his erudition was as a columnist in the Academy, a weekly literary magazine run by J. S. Cotton in London.
Bradley came to James Murray's attention in February 1884 when he reviewed the first fascicle of the OED, A–Ant, in the Academy. Bradley's review praised the clear format and simple design of the dictionary and its economy in using quotations, but it also challenged Murray's etymology, and this caused quite a stir. At the time, Bradley was an unknown freelance writer with no official academic credentials, yet his essay, showing a close knowledge of several languages, contained criticism that none of Murray's colleagues had been able to provide. Anemone could not correctly be rendered as "daughter of the wind," for example, because the Greek suffix was not "exclusively patronymic," and alpaca was not Arabic in origin, as Murray had written, but more likely Spanish.
Bradley's triumph was that both his praise and his criticism were fair and well-tempered; he was admiring without being sycophantic and corrective without being hostile. Recognizing that he had found a worthy peer who could prove invaluable in creating the Dictionary, Murray hired Bradley, first as an assistant editor, then as joint senior editor.
He has been overshadowed by James Murray, and it must be conceded that Bradley was a slower, less durable worker, frequently ill. However, he remains a noteworthy linguistic scholar, largely self-taught.
After starting work on the OED, Bradley began to get the recognition he deserved, receiving honorary degrees from Oxford and Heidelberg and becoming a fellow of Magdalen College and the British Academy. He also served as President of London's Philological Society and helped found the Society for Pure English (SPE), along with Henry Watson Fowler and others.
Henry Bradley contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography and the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He is the author, for example, for the article on Caedmon, the first English Christian poet. [2] [3]
Bradley's most interesting book is The Making of English, the culmination of a philological life. It assesses change in English and the reasons for its borrowings from other tongues down through history, all without resorting to the obscure sets of symbols so unhappily relied on by specialised linguistics. In his Author's Preface, Bradley addresses the book "to educated readers unversed in philology," and he succeeds in popularising his speciality and making it readable rather than resorting to jargon, which he considered an affront to plain English.
It was for the SPE that Bradley wrote his last piece, an introduction to "Tract No. XIV: On the Terms Briton, British, Britisher". He wrote the first three paragraphs, suffered a stroke, and died two days later. The piece was finished by Robert Bridges and published along with Fowler's "Preposition at End" and a brief obituary.
Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything is the history of the OED which treats Bradley in most depth.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first edition in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, and provides ongoing descriptions of English language usage in its variations around the world.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a non-fiction history book by British writer Simon Winchester, first published in England in 1998. It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.
William Chester Minor was an American army surgeon, psychiatric hospital patient, and lexicographical researcher.
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Frederick James Furnivall was an English philologist, best known as one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary. He founded a number of learned societies on early English literature and made pioneering and massive editorial contributions to the subject, of which the most notable was his parallel text edition of The Canterbury Tales. He was one of the founders of and teachers at the London Working Men's College and a lifelong campaigner against injustice.
Henry Alford was an English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer.
Charles Talbut Onions was an English grammarian and lexicographer and the fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Henry Watson Fowler was an English schoolmaster, lexicographer and commentator on the usage of the English language. He is notable for both A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and his work on the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and was described by The Times as "a lexicographical genius".
Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, FBA was a British lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1879 until his death.
Archibald Henry SayceFRAS was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919. He was able to write in at least twenty ancient and modern languages, and was known for his emphasis on the importance of archaeological and monumental evidence in linguistic research. He was a contributor to articles in the 9th, 10th and 11th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
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The Philological Society, or London Philological Society, is the oldest learned society in Great Britain dedicated to the study of language as well as a registered charity. The current Society was established in 1842 to "investigate and promote the study and knowledge of the structure, the affinities, and the history of languages". The society publishes a journal, the Transactions of the Philological Society, issued three times a year as well as a monographic series.
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William Holden Hutton was a British historian and a priest of the Church of England. He was Dean of Winchester from 1919 to 1930.
Robert Jowitt Whitwell B.Litt. was a British medievalist and medieval who made significant contributions to lexicography.
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary is a 2023 book by Sarah Ogilvie. The book examines the volunteer contributors who responded to public appeals by the Oxford English Dictionary for words. After finding address books that had belonged to editor James Murray in the basement archive of the Oxford University Press, Ogilvie conducted research into the identities of the contributors. Murray's address books, combined with those of Frederick Furnivall, included the names of some 3000 volunteers alongside the words they had submitted quotations for and which books they had used.