The Walrus and the Tolkien were walking close at hand
The Oxford English Dictionary began its life in the mid-19th century and was first published in fascicles starting in 1884, with the full first edition completed in 1928. Collecting words was a monumental task, and to accomplish it, readers from across Britain and beyond were invited to send in slips of paper with examples of words in use. These were gathered in James Murray’s famous “scriptorium”—a shed in his Oxford garden filled with thousands of small cubbies used for storing and sorting the submissions. From there, a large network of contributors and editors worked to collate the words and draft definitions. Fittingly, the dictionary’s very system of storage in Murray’s scriptorium gave rise to a new verb phrase: to “pigeonhole” something.
Many scholars contributed to particular subject areas or were assigned specific sections of the alphabet, including Sir Flinders Petrie, the pioneering Egyptologist, Eadweard Muybridge, the notorious motion-photographer, and Sir John Richardson, the naturalist and Arctic explorer. Among these contributors was J.R.R. Tolkien, who joined the OED staff in 1919 as a lexicographer, just after World War I. He was responsible for words beginning with the letter “W,” such as waggle, walrus, and wampum. The OED continued to play a part in his existence even after he was no longer a contributor; Tolkien was apparently not satisfied with the definition of walrus and continued working on the word privately for years, returning to it in his lectures as an example of philological difficulty. Several of Tolkien’s own coinages, including hobbit, later made their way into the pages of the OED. He remained involved in the revision of definitions throughout his life—watch this video to see how: