Our man at the Oxford English Dictionary enjoys the last word When he joined, there were 25 editors. Today, there are 70, sitting in silent concentration outside his office. The deep quiet of lexicographical brains at work is enveloping. Outside this room, there are hundreds of unseen scholars, research engineers, specialist consultants and readers. The dictionary has always appealed to the public for help in tracking down and compiling new words and usages, but the internet has turned that steady trickle into a torrent. "Contributors can send grumpy letters," says Simpson. They like to tell you what clots we are. But if you write back and show you have taken note, you find a poacher-turned-gamekeeper attitude. All the time, we are fighting against stereotypes - the long white beard, the Oxford elite. It's not like that at all. I want to show that the work is fun. The most infamous contributor was Dr William Minor, who, after years of correspondence with Murray on the first edition (1884-1928), was revealed to be a lunatic, confined to Broadmoor for murder. His story is told in Simon Winchester's bestseller The Surgeon of Crowthorne. "I don't think we have anyone quietly detained by the authorities," says Simpson drily. Lots of people we correspond with who are interested in words are quite obsessive, but that doesn't make them mad. It just makes them useful. Simpson can't bear sloppiness. In common with most lexicographers, he has an innate distrust of people who claim to "love words." "There is so much waffle and woolly-mindedness," he says. Our job is to analyse data, not to love words. If somebody writes in with a new fact, I start off by disbelieving it. He doesn't really think about words as "lovely little things," but about the circumstances in which they arose, the history, the culture. The more we work with the dictionary on the computer, the more we see that words are just part of the mosaic of language. New words - "the froth on a daydream" - don't excite him as they once did. I used to keep a notebook in my pocket in case I came across new words. That worked until I put my trousers in the washing machine. Besides, they are usually about 20 or 30 years older than people think, he points out. The new adjectival entry "buzzworthy," for instance, is assumed to be late 1990s, but is recorded almost two decades earlier. The OED's uniqueness, says Simpson, lies in rediscovering lost information about core words and putting it back in the public eye. He cites the verb "coalise" (to form a coalition), which the first edition traced back to 1794. The richness of today's lexical material has produced a 1697 use of the word, in the letters of an English pharmacist, John Houghton. Such triumphs are a lexicographer's orgasmatron (spanking new entry dating from Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper). Words and phrases recently embraced by the OED include "phone hacking"; "gurrier," an Irish-English colloquialism for a street urchin, c1936; and "heart attack on a plate," for which evidence dates back to 1984. The new entry for "great balls of fire!," indelibly associated with the Jerry Lee Lewis song of 1957, actually goes back to 1893. It takes about 10 years for a new word to pass through the fine-mesh editorial process to publication. But that is far from final. Every three months, the entire OED database is republished online, new words added, old words revised. Any of the dictionary's readers may spot more information to improve an entry and that will be reflected. Revisions can go on indefinitely as more antedatings are found and more information floods in. This is truly the Forth Bridge of word-work. Simpson would like people to be able to go home and press a button to review what appetising stuff the OED has truffled each day. He fantasises about having new dictionary entries shown continuously on screens in Trafalgar Square "so people can see what we're doing." Now 60, he joined the OED as an editorial assistant in 1976, fresh from university. He'd read English literature at York and medieval studies at Reading. Those were the days of card-index files, little-changed from Murray's time. It took his predecessor, Robert Burchfield, about five years to acknowledge the eager appointee, but when he did it was to invite him to edit The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. He was made chief editor in 1993, only the seventh since James Murray's appointment in 1879, and under his editorship more than 60,000 new words and meanings have been added to the OED. The great Third Edition is running wildly behind schedule but no one is crying woe because vast reserves of information, unimagined when the update began, have come slewing in from cyberspace. The plan was to complete OED3 by 2010, but it's not expected until 2028. Forty per cent of entries have been reappraised and rewritten - but they are constantly updated as well, "so you've got wheels spinning in different places," says Simpson. It might take 30 years to do the edition, but there are deadlines every week. It's a very practical activity, as well as an academic one. You can't allow people to wallow in undirected research. Simpson is not sentimental about leaving the job unfinished. His own career wheel is spinning towards the research website on James Joyce that he set up with a German colleague. And he expects that he and his wife, Hilary, author of D H Lawrence and Feminism, who was also a policy adviser to Oxfordshire County Council, will have more time to travel. It will be a bit like when we were students again. They have two grown-up daughters and two granddaughters, aged five and four. One daughter has learning difficulties and has never been able to speak, an irony almost too crushing to dwell on. Simpson reflects: "I sort of thought that, well, I'm the editor of the OED, I ought to be able to interpret her gestures and meanings and talk to her somehow as the years go by. But you can't. It's just a different plane of being that she's on. You can't quite get through to it. She responds well, but doesn't initiate anything. She can't tell you what she wants to do. To do this job, you've got to have quite a long view anyway. I wouldn't say I'm particularly religious, but you feel that somehow ... You learn things from somebody developing so very slowly and being dependent on you for such a long time. All this is said simply and with quiet acceptance, but with finality. The tenor of the interview has otherwise been amused and amusing. Simpson loves talking about his work, less about himself. The childish fascination with vocabulary that he has had for 40 years has served him and the English-speaking nations well. He recalls that the first word he worked on when he walked into the office was "queen." And the last? "There was a science editor who always wanted to work on the word 'aardvark,"" he smiles. That was his last entry. I think mine will be 'happy."" The OED is available at oed.com via subscription, or check with your local library for access