Rating: 6.5/10.
Memoir about how the Oxford English Dictionary is created. Author joins the team in the 1970s, after being a grad student in medieval literature. He reads obscure books from all sorts of genres to find new words to add, and often a lot of scholarly research and debate goes into settling a word’s etymology. The OED is a century-old project that has trouble keeping up, since it takes decades to complete a “supplement”, and by then, the language has already changed. Stopped reading after 100 or so pages because the writing got too tedious.
