There are many impressive things about the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but one in particular has long puzzled me. As an Australian, I have always been struck by its excellent coverage of Australian words. I am not talking about the inclusion of obvious words such as kookaburra, woomera, and fossick, but rather the hundreds of lesser-known words such as wonga-wonga (pigeon), wurley (hut), and yarran (species of acacia), and even more obscure ones such as brickfielder, defined as a ‘local name in Sydney, New South Wales, for a thick cloud of dust brought over the city by a south wind from neighbouring sandhills (called the ‘Brickfields’)’.

All these words were put in by the longest-serving editor, Dr James Murray (1837–1915). But he didn’t come up with them alone in Oxford. Someone in Australia sent them to him, and I have always wondered who that was.

Begun in 1858, and completed in 1928, the OED was the first to attempt to include every word in the English language, to describe these words using historical principles, and to use a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach. To accomplish this huge task, the editors knew that a small group of men in London or Oxford could not do it alone. They reached out to the public all over the world for help, asking them to read the books they had to hand and to send in words and quotations from those books. The response was massive, and the dictionary became one of the world’s first crowdsourcing projects, the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century.