There are longer books (dashed few). There are books with less jerky plot-lines. But none of their great dictionaries pack the heavy artillery of the Oxford English Dictionary. Twenty volumes (and rising), 300,000-plus main entries, 2.5 million illustrative quotations . . . This is a book to stop a jumbo jet, not a door. It is the emperor of dictionaries. It records English from the Old English of our rude Anglo-Saxon forefathers down to the rude English of our new generations. The first dictionaries defined difficult “inkhorn” words. Samuel Johnson published the first modern dictionary in 1755, with illustrative quotations from literary authors. He said he was not going to cite living authors to prevent cronyism; but he slipped and started quoting his own work. Many of his etymologies are rubbish: lucus a non lucendo. His original intention was to preserve the purity of English. But as he worked, he realised that this was as hopeless as Canute’s fatidical gesture at stopping the tide. “I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of Earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.”

Johnson’s dictionary was authoritative for a century. Then the baton passed to James Murray, a schoolmaster at Mill Hill. He worked in a corrugated-iron garden shed, the Scriptorium, using his large family as clerks and runners. As the project grew he moved Scriptorium, slip and slippage, to Oxford. The Post Office put up a letter-box beside it for the Niagara of mail.

The OED was published by fascicles (little bundles from the fasces, bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors) from 1888 to 1933. Robert Burchfield took up the baton for the second edition (including the obscene four-letter words for the first time) in four thumping volumes. Now the great dictionary grows electronically, daily on the internet. You can criticise the OED, if you dare. It is prescriptive, describing certain usages as (shock, horror) erroneous. It is elitist, recording published authors and not spoken chitchat. But it is the best choice for desert island reading, an essential tool for writers, and a publication of great charm as well as weight. Where else would you find “fatidical” (prophetic), “lant” (to add urine to ale) and “acnestis” (that part of an animal’s back that the animal cannot reach to scratch)?

To read it from cover to cover is (dare I say this?) a waste of time. And impossible. I do not believe that Ammon Shea read every single word, without nodding off. How could I wade through the 60,000 words describing the 430 meanings of “set”? And the suspense of reading that curious quotation, and wanting to know what happens next? Magnificent. Credo quia absurdum est. Bravo.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy