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Leofranc Holford-Strevens

  • The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Like a Member of Parliament, I must declare an interest: I am employed by the publisher of both the OED and Simon Winchester’s account of its genesis. However, I have had no involvement with the latter, whose author’s qualities are well known to readers of his previous books, most relevantly The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and little with the former, which hardly needs my twopenn’orth of praise and whose faults, as revealed over the years, are being addressed in a new edition.

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Leofranc Holford-Strevens is consultant scholar-editor at OUP.

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