Sarah Ogilvie: The Dictionary People

What do three murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary.

Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of one of the world’s most famous books, which has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men. Sarah traces the lives of thousands of contributors – from eccentric autodidacts to families that made word collecting their passion – who defined the English language.

Indulge your word nerdery with this world-leading linguist and lexicographer in conversation with host Phillipa McGuinness.

Sarah Ogilvie is author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. She teaches at the University of Oxford and specializes in language, dictionaries and technology. As a lexicographer, she has been an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and was Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries in Australia. As a technologist, she has worked in Silicon Valley at Lab 126, Amazon's innovation lab, where she was part of the team that developed the Kindle. She was born and grew up in Brisbane, where she studied computer science and mathematics before taking her doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Oxford and then teaching at Cambridge and Stanford.

Phillipa McGuinness is the editor of Openbook, the State Library of NSW's glossy quarterly magazine. A former non-fiction book publisher, she is the author of two books published by Penguin, Skin Deep: the inside story of our outer selves and The Year Everything Changed – 2001, which was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature and the Queensland Literary Awards. She is also the editor of Copyfight. Her work has appeared in Griffith Review, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, The Weekend Australian Magazine and The Australian Women's Weekly.

This event is presented in partnership with Sydney Writers’ Festival.