339. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Simon Winchester)

78 Banbury Road, Oxford -- the home of James Murray, editor of the OED

Synopsis from Amazon Canada:
Ask a logophile or crossword-puzzle addict what the holiest of holy reference works might be, and you're almost certain to receive a three-letter acronym in reply: the OED. Now in 20 volumes and still growing, the Oxford English Dictionary is an astounding monument, one that, like the Great Wall and the Roman Forum, seems to have been around forever. But, writes the always interesting explorer Simon Winchester in The Meaning of Everything, it took decades -- and considerable sums of money -- to bring it into being. The Scottish autodidact James Augustus Henry Murray, surrounded by a small army of underpaid and overworked helpers, laboured over it for more than half a century, seeing into print "a total of 227,779,589 letters and numbers, occupying fully 178 miles of type" that brought the elusive histories of words such as walrus (courtesy of J. R. R. Tolkien) and cow ("the female of any bovine animal," courtesy of Murray himself) into sharp relief.

My rating: 4 stars