Using the Oxford English
Dictionary for Close Reading
The Oxford English Dictionary is the most important dictionary of the English
language: it is an invaluable research tool for English majors and you should get
into the habit of using it every time you close read. Using the OED takes some
practice, though: using any dictionary requires you to think about what you’re
reading, but using the OED also requires you to think about the context of what
you’re reading. This extra thinking and the detailed information you can learn
from the OED will pay off in better, more accurate, and more insightful analyses
of the texts you study.
1) Determine the word’s “part of speech” in the text you are reading. To
accomplish this step, ask yourself if the word functions grammatically in its
sentence as a noun (a person, place, or thing), a pronoun (a word that replaces a
noun), a verb (an action word), an adjective (a word describing a noun or
pronoun), an adverb (a word describing a verb), a conjunction (a “linking” word),
or an interjection (an utterance or exclamation, often of emotion, as in, “ewww,”
or “alas!”). If you aren’t sure which is the right part of speech, you may need to
“parse” the sentence (break it down grammatically) before you can complete this
step. Do so by finding the subject and main verb and working from there.
5) Once you are confident that you know the word’s part of speech, read the
whole of the first appropriate entry, looking for the meaning(s) most relevant
to the word in its literary context. If none of the definitions in the first entry
seems right, go back and choose the next entry and read the definitions there.
Some words, like “mere,” can function as different parts of speech and also have
multiple entries per part of speech: “mere” can be a noun, adjective, verb, or
adverb, and there are seven entries just for the noun form of “mere,” “n. 1″
through “n. 7.” Note, then, that this stage of your research requires reading and
thinking and can take a little time.
6) When you have found the entry that seems right for the word you’re researching
and you have found the meaning within the entry that also seems right, read and
think about the examples following the definition. The examples show you the
earliest dates of use for the words’ meanings. (Note that “OE” means “Old
English” and sometimes appears in lieu of a date. In the example of “mere, n. 1,”
the first definition given lists four examples from OE texts before giving a Middle
English example from “c. 1400.” “C.” here means “circa,” or “around.”) Use the
information in the examples to see whether the definition was “current” (in use)
when the text you’re studying was written. (Obviously, you need to know the date
of the text you are studying to complete this stage!) If a definition wasn’t current
around or before the composition date of the text you’re studying, then the word
can’t have had the meaning given in the definition. (Note finally that profanities
and other slang words are sometimes exceptions to this rule: their histories are
often much longer than the OED will allow.)
Example and Demonstration
Let’s put the above steps into action and see what we can learn when we use the
OED for close reading. For the sake of demonstration, we’ll use a passage from
everyone’s favorite Old English epic, Beowulf. Describing Grendel’s mother’s
home, the poet writes:
A few miles from here
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps
watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of
tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something
uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has
never been sounded by the sons of men. (1362-8)
Much could be said about these lines, but we’ll focus on a single word so we can
concentrate on how to use the OED.
First, choose an interesting word from the passage, like a word you don’t
know or one that seems familiar but appears to be used in an unusual way.
We’ll use a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word — “mere” — as our example
to figure out what the OED can add to our comprehension and interpretation of a
literary text. (Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, quoted above, retains the
passage’s original Old English word “mere” for Grendel and his mother’s home
[1364, 1367], so we can safely proceed with close reading. Do realize, though, that
close reading only truly “works” when you are analyzing a text in its original
language.) What’s a “mere,” exactly? As it turns out, the answer is complicated.
The OED will help us interpret the Beowulf-poet’s nuanced vocabulary choice.
Next, determine the word’s part of speech and read some definitions.
From literary context we can tell that “mere” has to be a noun (the right part of
speech for places). If we read the entry for “mere, n. 1″ we see that mere can mean
“sea.” We also see that Beowulf is given as an example of a poem using the word
in this way:
OE Beowulf 1362 Nis þæt feor heonon milgemearces, þæt
se mere standeð.
It seems logical to conclude that Grendel and his mother live in the sea. But if we
read down the entry list, we see that a second possible meaning is a pool or body
of standing water, like a lake, and that, again, this sense of the word is found in
Beowulf (in the very section of the poem we’re analyzing; 1362, above and below,
refers to the line number).
OE Beowulf 1362 Nis þæt feor heonon milgemearces, þæt
se mere stanðeð.
So which one does the poet mean — the sea or a lake? What if we allow both
possibilities to exist simultaneously, even if that seems strange at first, and see
what happens?
If we allow the word to have both meanings, it could indicate that Grendel and his
mother live in an inland body of water connected (literally or figuratively) to the
sea. As you know, England is an island; even though the Grendelkin live in
Denmark, the poet may have English meres (see picture, right) in mind. Maybe
Grendel
and his mother live in a pool that sometimes connects to the sea (depending on the
season, weather, or tide) but that also sometimes stands separate, or maybe their
mere connects to the sea underground, or in some other way. (For the record,
scholars have long debated on the precise nature of the mere in Beowulf; for
example, see William Witherie Lawrence, “The Haunted Mere in Beowulf”
[PMLA 27. 2 (1912): pp. 208-245].)
Now (re)consider the likeliest meanings and eliminate illogical ones.
We’ve found two strong definitions in “n. 1″ and they don’t have to be mutually
exclusive. If we read the rest of the definitions in that entry, we see that two more
specific meanings, “inlet” and “marsh,” do not become current until later
centuries, so we can reject them. Let’s go on to the next entry. The definition
given for “mere, n. 2″ is “a boundary, a border.” This is interesting and seems
possibly relevant to the passage because the meaning was available in Old
English, and certainly one can live in or on a boundary or border. However, we
know from context clues in the poem that “mere” is more likely to refer
specifically to a body of water since, at least in Heaney’s translation, it has a
“bank” and a “bottom” and a “surface.” Still, we’ll keep this second meaning —
border or boundary — in mind as possible wordplay in the passage; perhaps the
poet did, too.
Moving on, clearly we can reject the definition given for “mere, n. 3,” “mermaid”
or “siren” — the Grendelkin can’t possibly live in or on a mermaid, so that
definition seems completely unlikely. The same logic applies to entries n. 4-n.7,
given “mere’s” grammatical function and literary context in Beowulf and its
history of use.
We’re almost there: read the word’s etymology and see what it adds to your
understanding.
Finally, if we read the etymology for “mere,” we learn that the Old English word
is “cognate” (“born with,” sharing a common origin) with words in old
Scandinavian languages (like Old Frisian) and with Latin (“mare,” sea, from
which the French “mer” also derives). That means we’re looking at a very old
word, one likely to have been familiar to and to have resonated with Beowulf‘s
audience. “Mere” might be related to words like “moor,” “marsh,” and “march,”
so the OED tells us that the original Germanic stem word might have meant
“wetland.” The etymology can lend support to our developing theory that the mere
is an inland pool connected (whether literally or figuratively) to the sea.
Finally, use your research to analyze the passage in which you found the
word.
Now that we know what the word means and we know something of its history,
we can go back to the text and interpret the passage containing the word using that
information. We’ve discovered that Grendel and his mother live in a pool of
standing water that may connect to the sea. In other words, they aren’t properly
speaking sea-monsters, but they probably don’t live in a landlocked body of water,
either. So what?
It’s time to ask questions of the text in order to close read it: “What could be
significant about the fact that the Grendelkin live in a mere, sea and not-sea,
instead of some other kind of body of water? How would it change things if they
lived in the ocean itself, or in a river, or in a more clearly landlocked lake?” One
answer to these questions might be that their home is a symbolic space as well as a
literal one: their mere reflects its inhabitants’ nature. (Poets often use geography
and landscape metaphorically, so this kind of thinking is not necessarily a stretch.)
The word “mere,” with its two meanings, may tell us that the Grendelkin live on
the marshy, fungible border between land and sea. In turn, that geographical space
could represent the metaphorical space between human civilization and
wilderness. The mere itself, by virtue of its definition and etymology, could
represent the terrifying threshold or limen between man and nature, between life
and death, between safety and the abyss, and between the known and the
unknown. This interpretation seems tenable since elsewhere in the text we learn
that Grendel and his mother are themselves “in between” human and inhuman;
they look like people and have human ancestors yet they are exiles from and
hostile towards civilization. They are both people and not-people. They and the
water they live in are both “ambiguous” — having more than one meaning — and
“paradoxical” — seemingly self-contradicting.
As this demonstration shows, the OED can help you build your “word hoard” by
teaching you more about words and how they have been used. The OED can also
enable you to discover words’ many levels of meaning and to “historicize” those
levels. Finally, doing this kind of research can help you think creatively when you
analyze literature while helping you ground your flights of fancy in facts. Think of
it this way: in this handout, I used a terrible example, a word from an ancient
poem that is notoriously internally inconsistent, that may have had multiple
authors, and that most of us today read in translation — not a great candidate for a
stable or secure close reading. Nevertheless, the experiment worked: researching a
single vocabulary word facilitated a logical, complex interpretation of the text, and
secondary research confirms (trust me) that other scholars have drawn similar
kinds of conclusions. By using the OED for close reading, you, too, can unlock
deeper meaning in literature.
1 For simplicity’s sake, in this handout I assume that a single poet or poets
collaborating together had the “final word” on the words in Beowulf – obviously,
a big assumption!