CSL in the OED: Check the Dictionary

David Clarke, a Scottish accountant, has published an unusual article about C. S. Lewis in the January-February 1999 issue of CSL: Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society titled “CSL in the OED.” There he assembles and analyzes the use of quotations by C. S. Lewis in the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary. Clarke begins by stating that there are over two million quotations from various sources in the OED, and 214 of these (totalling slightly fewer than 4,000 words) are from works by Lewis.

Clarke found that 63 of these quotations were from Lewis’s academic works, the longest single quotation being from Allegory of Love. There are 39 quotations from Lewis’s apologetic works, 36 from Lewis’s personal letters, and 19 from Lewis’s poetry. There are a dozen quotations from the Ransom novels and four from the Narnia stories. Finally, there are seven from Selected Literary Essays, two from both Of This ad other Worlds and The Personal Heresy, and one each from Till We Have Faces, Christian Reflections, and Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Clarke found that almost 15 percent of the Lewis quotations were to explain foreign words or phrases (including philia and Sehnsucht). In other categories Lewis was cited for courtly, sacramentalism, picture, Beatrician, interplanetary, root, technocracy, new, subtopian, bandersnatch, and kurfuffle.

Clarke concludes “I trust that from the extent of coverage both in terms of type and timing of material, you will agree with me that the current editors of the OED still hold Lewis in high regard as far as his use and invention of words is concerned.”