The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and fascinating book. It took over 70 years to complete the dictionary, and thousands of contributors. Many of the people involved were insane. It was like a Victorian rallying cause for the pedantic, the meticulous, the martyred; the British.

It's a charming narrative, only slightly marred by passages like this:

...the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

So, ever look up the word "hubris"?