VICTORIAN SEMITIC PHILOLOGIST MAKES GOOD: becomes the editor of the O.E.D. A New York Times review by William F. Buckley Jr. of THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. By Simon Winchester. Illustrated. 260 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25.

Excerpts:

''I possess,'' the schoolteacher [James Murray] had written straightforwardly, ''that general lexical & structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge'' of any language ''only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German and Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenecian to the point where it was left by Gesenius.'' Enough said? No. There was the itchy problem of the absent college degree. So it was discreetly arranged, by an advocate of Murray among the Philological Society's members, that he receive one, an honorary LL.D. from Scotland.

[...]

Shakespeare, [Winchester] reminds us, ''was the first to employ a great many'' unusual words. High purposes were served. ''By doing so he offered actors the chance to enrich the language of those who came to see his plays. In 'Othello,' for example, the Moor entreats the Duke of Venice to offer his wife Desdemona 'Due reference of place and exhibition, With such accommodation and besort as levels with her breeding,' and thereby offers the first known usage . . . of the word 'accommodation.' ''

But don't run away with the impression that Shakespeare's neologisms were orthogenetically validated. ''It has to be said that Shakespeare did advance the cause of a number of words -- like 'besort' -- that never made it, or which staggered along lamely for only a short while. Among those he used, but he almost alone, were 'soilure,' 'tortive' and 'vastidity,' which mean, as one might expect, staining, twisted and big. In these cases, and a score of others, his clever Latinate constructions fared rather less well than the simpler old synonyms from northern Europe.''

Actually, I strongly suspect that "vastidity" means not "big," but "bigness."