J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the Oxford English Dictionary.

J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is the grandfather of modern fantasy; his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings formed the foundation of the genre. But before the renowned writer and philologist crafted the world of Middle-earth, he spent some time working on another vital text, the Oxford English Dictionary. After being discharged from the British army due to illness, he got a job on staff at the OED from 1919 to 1920. During that time, he worked on words near the beginning of the “w” section, from “waggle” to “warlock.” (Tolkien might’ve been assigned this section because many “w” words, including “walnut,” “walrus,” and “wampum,” have difficult etymologies.) The famous author once said that he “learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life.”

Although Tolkien’s tenure at the preeminent dictionary was a short one, his influence on linguistic tome continued for years to come. In 1969, when an OED editor reached out to Tolkien for comment on the addition of the word “hobbit” to the dictionary, the author responded with a definition twice as long as the original — the dictionary printed Tolkien’s version almost verbatim. The OED eventually added many more words from Tolkien’s famous high fantasy series — including gems such as “mithril,” “Orcish,” and “troll.”

By the Numbers

Did you know?

The first English dictionary included only 3,000 words.

The first dictionary of modern English, A Table Alphabeticall, was published in 1604, just a handful of years after William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Containing only about 3,000 words with simple definitions and no references or word origins, the dictionary was the sole work of Robert Cawdrey, an English schoolmaster and clergyman. Cawdrey set out to provide a text where readers “may more easily and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere.” This dictionary was the first attempt to catalog words found in modern English, as opposed to Middle English, which preceded it. So many innovations occurred in the language in the 15th century — including pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary — that it’s likely that Shakespeare would’ve had as tough a time reading Geoffrey Chaucer (who wrote The Canterbury Tales in Middle English) as we do today. Although Cawdrey’s work was a valiant first attempt, many English dictionaries have been written since, and the latest Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 170,000 words in total.