1

This survey of the history of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) is based on three sorts of materials: materials in print, chiefly in the Prefaces of the volumes of the Dictionary and the writings of Sir William Craigie and Professor A. J. Aitken; official papers, principally the minutes of the Joint Council for the Scottish Dictionaries (subsequently, the Joint Council for the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue); and private writings, especially correspondence held in the DOST Archives. In the last two categories, we are extremely fortunate to have a file of correspondence and official papers from the period 1949-58 contributed to the Dictionary Archives by Professor Angus McIntosh.

PHASE I 1919-1948

On the 4th of April, 1919 Dr (later Sir) William A. Craigie, co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), read a paper entitled ‘New Dictionary Schemes’ to the Philological Society in London. In this paper he suggested that, following the completion of OED, a number of supplementary dictionary projects should be undertaken. These he referred to as ‘period dictionaries’, each being concerned with a discrete chronological period in the history of English. His last suggested scheme was not exactly of a period of English but the dictionary that, one might surmise, lay closest to his heart, a dictionary of the ‘older Scottish.’ This proposal bore fruit as the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue.

There seems never to have been any doubt in Craigie’s mind that this dictionary of Scots should restrict itself to the earlier period – up to 1700. He saw the project as lying within his plans for English, and the major sweep of English had been encompassed in OED. He conceded that, in the earlier period, Scots was a language, but had no notion that such nomenclature might continue to have any truth or even advantage after 1700. He saw the language as dividing naturally into the two periods now defined by the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND).

It is certainly well to be looking ahead with regard to the Scottish dictionary. I have been doing so too, and have made up my mind that when the Oxford Dictionary is finished, I shall undertake the Old Scottish one myself...Some time ago I asked Watson[3] whether, in the event of funds being provided for the Modern Scottish dictionary, he would be prepared to take a hand in the compiling of it...It would be excellent if the two Dictionaries could be produced concurrently, so that the one could link up with the other and the continuity (or otherwise) of the words be clearly shown. In that case Watson might be a kind of connecting medium for both.

Craigie set to work seriously on DOST in 1921, when, with the help of a number of volunteer readers[4], he began to expand the collection of quotations inherited from OED. Pre-eminent among his assistants during this period was Miss Isabella B. Hutchen, his sister-in-law, who worked for the Dictionary from 1921 to 1945. Over this period she excerpted some three hundred volumes of printed and manuscript material, as well as organising the excerpting of other volunteers. In the winter of 1925-6, Craigie, by this time Professor of English in the University of Chicago, with the assistance of George Watson and Otto Schmidt, began editing from the collections so far available to him. In 1929 a Memorandum of Agreement was drawn up between Craigie and the University of Chicago for the publication of ‘A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue’, which would be printed in Oxford by Oxford University Press. According to the terms of this agreement the University of Chicago would: ‘publish the said work at its own expense, through its University Press.’

The first fascicle of the Dictionary was published in 1931. Volume I, in six fascicles, was completed in 1937 and Volume II came out in fascicles in 1938, 1940, 1946, 1947, 1949 and 1951, the gap reflecting the impossibility of continued publication during the 1939-45 war. At this time the preparation and production of the published work seems to have consisted largely of excerpting and editing without the systematic press-preparation that became part of the production process at a later date. The Agreement of 1929 stated that the Dictionary would be completed in 25 parts of 120 pages each.

PHASE II 1948-1981

The work of editing continued very largely under Craigie’s sole hand until the appointment of Adam J. Aitken in 1948. This was facilitated, as were a number of other initiatives concerning the Scottish Dictionaries, by Craigie’s friend and former colleague J. M. Wyllie, Editor of the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Craigie had retired in 1936, returning from Chicago to Watlington, near Oxford, where he continued to edit material for DOST. Aitken, as Craigie’s assistant, was based in Edinburgh and funded from year to year as a Research Fellow by the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. With the appointment of Aitken in 1948 the second major period in the history of the project had begun.

Aitken was a young man of 27 when he took up this post in which he was to spend the rest of his career. Not that this seemed inevitable in the beginning. For a number of years he was employed on temporary contracts, renewed annually, a fact that disturbed Angus McIntosh, Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh, who was concerned both for the welfare of Aitken and the long-term interest of the Dictionary. An extract from a letter to Craigie in 1950 reveals McIntosh’s view of the state of affairs:

I venture to write to you about two matters, neither of which is strictly speaking my business, but I hope you will forgive me just the same.

The first concerns A. J. Aitken. I do not know how you feel about him, but we have a very high regard for him here, and it would please me very much if something could be done to alter the present terms of his appointment. I understand that at the moment he is appointed on a year to year basis and what I wonder is whether anything could be done to give him a permanent appointment, or one at least as long as the completion of the Dictionary. I hasten to add that he himself has never spoken to me about this, but I feel that it would be the proper basis for him to be on after a period of trial. If you feel that he has proved his worth on the Dictionary and feel that he would be suitable in all ways as a permanent member of the Dictionary staff, I should be glad to do anything in my power here to support any proposal from you that his tenure of office should no longer be on a year to year basis. I feel the more anxious to do something of this sort for Aitken since he is the very last person to bring anything of this sort up himself.

Craigie’s response is equally illuminating:

I should very much like to see Aitken’s appointment put on a better footing than at present not only on account of the Dictionary, but for his own sake and for the good work he could do for the University in promoting the study of the older Scottish language and literature. I know of no one better fitted to carry on the dictionary work successfully and hope that it will be possible for him to do so. It may, however, be advisable to wait a little before making a decision which would depend on the dictionary, for this reason. In January last year I wrote to Mr Hemens, the assistant director of the University of Chicago Press.

Craigie goes on to describe the delicacy of relations with Chicago University Press. If they were to break down it would lead almost inevitably to the abandonment of the Dictionary project.

Although DOST continued to be published by Chicago University Press until 1981, there were during that period a number of crises the first of which occurred in 1950. In 1949 Craigie had written to Mr Hemens, Assistant Director of the Press, to inform him that it had become clear that the Dictionary could not be completed in 25 parts but was likely to run to 10-12 more. Hemens replied that the Press was prepared to face the extra cost that this would entail:

In 1950, however, the situation worsened. In February, as mentioned above, Craigie alerted McIntosh to a change of attitude in Chicago due to rising costs and the failure to attract outside funding. The problem of the increase in scale of the Dictionary and consequent rise in costs was what led to Chicago’s unwillingness to continue under the previous agreement with Craigie alone. However, in October a new contract was signed with Chicago to which the University of Edinburgh became a party. To help to meet the increase in costs Edinburgh agreed to forego royalties, which would stop with the death of Craigie. Edinburgh would succeed to Craigie's rights on his ceasing, for whatever reason, to be the compiler of the Dictionary, without payment, and would then select a new compiler to replace Craigie. In that event, Craigie agreed to hand over to Edinburgh for its use in completing the work, without payment, all records, papers and other data relating to the work.

I greatly appreciate your letter...bringing us up to date on the progress with the Older Scottish Dictionary. I have had some hope that it might move along faster. However, instead of two or three parts per year, it looks as though we are likely to get one, or the equivalent of one and a half.

I regret that the University of Aberdeen has withdrawn its financial support [sc. in part-funding Aitken]. Apparently all educational institutions are getting increasingly short of funds. It is certainly true here...I previously told you of our financial struggle to keep the Dictionary going. The situation has gotten worse rather than improved. We are having to handle it on a year-to-year basis. There is always the hope that funds will be available, but there is no guarantee.

We need from you a commitment and performance in line with that commitment as to the maximum total number of parts to encompass this work. When publication was undertaken it was with the expectation there would be a maximum of twenty parts. After it had been under way and a number of parts published, it was perfectly obvious that you were not keeping within that limit. Based on completion of the first approximately ten parts, it then looked as though the total would not be twenty parts, but twice that number, or more. That completely upset the financial arrangements which we had made.

At times it becomes discouraging and somewhat disheartening to fight for the funds necessary to keep this production and publishing program for the Dictionary going. At one time, only a few years ago, I was instructed to have production stopped and cancel the order with Oxford. I wilfully disregarded those instructions. I believe we should do all that we can to complete publication of the Dictionary. I still believe that. I had hopes, but that was all I could have, that something would happen to change the financial picture. Unfortunately that something has not happened and, if anything, the finances are worse.

The need for a resolution to Craigie’s proposal for securing DOST’s future after his own lifetime and for the management of the project within the environs of the Scottish Universities was evident to McIntosh. His perception of the value of the project both to Scotland and to Edinburgh is also clear. He worked tirelessly, using all his skills of persuasion and his contacts within the academic world to bring his vision about. In November 1951 the matter was brought before the Scottish Universities’ Conference by Edinburgh University. The timing of this was provoked not only by the situation with DOST but that of the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) which was undergoing a financial crisis of its own in Aberdeen. The outcome of this meeting is contained in a communication from the Principal of Edinburgh University to Hemens:

The force of these proposals...is that, in making an appeal for funds, it is desirable to present the two Dictionaries as together forming a major project covering the whole field of Scottish lexicography, carried on in a properly co-ordinated manner in one place; and that an appeal by the four Scottish Universities on behalf of this work of national importance would be a more powerful means of obtaining financial assistance than an appeal by (say) the University of Edinburgh on behalf of only one of the Dictionaries.

Certain points, however, must be made clear in explanation of these proposals. Firstly, they do not imply any control of the editorial policies of the Dictionaries, or any interference by one Dictionary in the affairs of the other. It is fully appreciated that their editorial methods differ in several respects, and it is agreed that all such matters of policy should remain under the present system of separate control...

In terms of the 1950 Agreement, what we have to lay before you is this: that the Compiler (Sir William Craigie) and the Institute (the University of Edinburgh) propose now to enter into a separate Agreement with a Joint Council which will represent the four Scottish Universities, the S.N.D. Association, and the Compiler and editorial staff of the D.O.S.T. Our object in doing so is to raise funds to establish an adequate editorial staff for the D.O.S.T. and so to improve the rate of work on the Dictionary; and we are confident that if this can be achieved it will help materially to lighten the task of the University of Chicago with regard to the publication of the Dictionary.

So Edinburgh set out its proposal. The Scottish Universities would give what help they could with accommodation and a modicum of financial support, hoping to raise most of the new funding required to create a viable project from wealthy American Foundations. They would take responsibility for the production side if Chicago continued with publication, which, if all went well with the Scottish Universities fund-raising, would no longer be a financial burden. It is interesting to note that, according to Craigie, the cost of publishing DOST which Hemens found much too high was, for setting Part XIII, 164 pages, £420 with £94 for corrections, whereas Part IV of Vol. III of SND, 134 pages, cost £1,100. Above all the Scottish Universities wanted to keep Chicago on board, and phrased the proposal for a Joint Council in terms they thought least likely to cause it to pull out.

By February 1950 Craigie had started making arrangements for various parcels of books to be transported from his home in Oxfordshire to Aitken in Edinburgh. Around the same time Sir Edward Appleton, the Principal of Edinburgh University, authorised Aitken to spend £100 on the books most necessary to him. At this point in 1950 the Dictionary library from these two sources amounted to 143 volumes. In October 1952, 28 cartons of slips were brought by rail from Craigie to Aitken. These amounted to 400,000 slips covering the letters L-Z. In 1955 Craigie similarly consigned to him the material for J and K and the unused material for those parts of the Dictionary already published along with the rest of the editorial library. This was the beginning of what has become over the subsequent fifty years a most remarkable collection.

Thus, as it turned out, so far from being a time of disintegration, this was a period both of consolidation and expansion. In 1948 the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow had supported the employment of Aitken with a research fellowship which in 1954, after the setting up of the Joint Council, was converted into a lectureship supported jointly by the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Edinburgh University supplied accommodation, first in Minto House, where the Department of English Language and Linguistics, the newly formed School of Scottish Studies and the equally newly set up Linguistic Survey of Scotland were housed. When in 1953 the School moved to 27 George Square, DOST went with it and was accommodated in the suite of rooms which it continued to occupy until the completion of the project 48 years later.

One of the outcomes of these initiatives in Scottish studies, in which such a prominent part was taken by McIntosh, was, as explained above, the setting up in 1952 of the Joint Council for the Scottish Dictionaries with McIntosh as its Convener. In 1955 Aitken took over from Craigie as editor of DOST and by the close of this period its funding and government had altered radically. DOST had become for management purposes a department within the University of Edinburgh, overseen by the Joint Council representing the four Universities and funded in part by them, in part by a variety of charitable foundations. Two years later Craigie, a notable scholar in many fields, and one of a line of extraordinary Scottish lexicographers, died at the age of ninety.

The financing of an adequate level of staffing was a perennial problem. In 1952 Aitken had received a small grant of £100 from the School of Scottish Studies Committee, with which he had employed a part-time assistant, Miss Iona B. MacGregor. Aitken, in his report to the Committee the following year remarked:

I have no hesitation in saying that she is well worth the 4/- [4 shillings] per hour which she is paid. Since she has arrived there has been a perceptible acceleration of the output of finished dictionary copy, which is directly attributable to her contribution.

Miss MacGregor was required to ‘rough out the material for editing’ which Aitken then completed. In the year for which she was contracted, he reckoned she would complete fifty of the Dictionary’s pages. She was also reassigning citation slips to words further down the alphabet, sorting the material which had arrived from Craigie, and had done some library research for Aitken. This accounted for £90 of the £100 grant. In 1953 the School Committee was not able to renew the grant. A letter from Aitken to McIntosh clarifies the precariousness of the situation:

I understand that this year the School’s allotment of money is likely to be largely used up, and also that there may be other objections to making even a small non-recurrent grant to an enterprise which is not a responsibility of the School itself.[6]

At this point, in February 1953, Aitken applied to Dr J. R. Peddie of the Carnegie Trust for support for his assistant. His letter makes it clear that a previous application made ‘some years ago’ had been successful in obtaining a grant of £300. On this occasion a grant of £150 was forthcoming from the Trust, and, perhaps more importantly, a connection that was to be crucial to the future of the Dictionary was reinforced.

During this period Aitken put a great deal of effort into expanding the Dictionary’s corpus.[7] One aspect directly affected by the enlargement of the corpus was the scale of the Dictionary. This had been problematical for years and had been one of the causes for Chicago’s unhappiness about the project as far back as 1949. This situation had not changed when in 1953 Aitken tried to calculate the likely number of parts in the finished Dictionary by a comparison with the size of OED. He reckoned that for A-Indentit each of DOST’s parts of 120 pages corresponded to 376 pages of OED. This equation allowed him to calculate that, corresponding to the total of 15,487 pages in OED, DOST, when completed, would have 4,920 pages or 41 parts. During this period, as later, the production of edited copy was not Aitken’s only responsibility. His time was taken up all too often with tasks of a more managerial sort. He also taught a course in Scots in the English Language Department in Edinburgh University and continued to do so up until 1979 when he returned to full-time work on the Dictionary.

The development of the infrastructure for funding and academic support and the expansion of the corpus led to an expansion of the project as a whole and set it on a new footing. The size of the staff increased: both editors who prepared edited copy and editorial assistants who carried out the various tasks required to prepare the raw slips for editing and afterwards to prepare edited copy for the press. Aitken was the sole Editor until, in 1973, Dr J.A.C. Stevenson, who had come to DOST in 1966 from a career in teaching, was appointed Joint-Editor with him. Despite Stevenson’s non-academic background, his scholarly instincts and meticulousness in the analysis of language were fully in keeping with the quality and attention to detail for which DOST was renowned. The attitude that the project was much more a matter of scholarship than a product to be got speedily into the marketplace was characteristic of historical lexicographers from the time of Sir James Murray at least. OED’s original remit, for instance, had been to restrict the etymological material included on the grounds that it was a historical dictionary rather than an etymological one. However, in practice this restriction was largely ignored. Coming from this tradition, Craigie had set about his task with the intention of expanding the history of Older Scots as fully as he could. So too in his turn Aitken saw the gaps in coverage and the need to fill them if a record of Scots up to 1700 were to be as close to exhaustive as might be. These perfectionist tendencies which he confessed to in the paper ‘DOST: How we make it and what’s in it,’[8] were always evident, and the Dictionary itself is all the better for them, even if the funding bodies felt plagued by this compulsion to edit to the absolutely highest standards. So Stevenson fitted into a lineage of high scholarship with ease and, through the 1970s especially, developed the highly analytical style that is so evident in the volumes from that period on.

In 1969, Aitken expressed the hope that DOST might be completed in 1976, shortly after the scheduled completion of SND in 1974. In 1971 the fact that SND was approaching completion (it was completed in 1976) and the expectation that DOST would follow soon thereafter gave rise to a number of proposals for the future. An Institute of Lexicography dealing especially with an archive of computer-readable texts was suggested, as well as a project to produce an abridged dictionary. The Joint Council took the view that exploration of the former proposal should not be such as to have a prejudicial effect on the production of the Dictionary, though it merited further consideration. The latter continued to be researched with the hope that it might come about on the completion of SND, and led ultimately to the publication of the Concise Scots Dictionary (CSD).[9] As the completion of SND drew closer it led to a further debate as to whether the Joint Council should be wound up and DOST supported until its completion by Edinburgh alone. However, by the end of 1976 the old Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews and the new Universities of Dundee and Stirling had confirmed their desire to continue to participate in funding the project. Heriot-Watt, which had never supported the project, and Strathclyde, which was involved briefly in the early 1970s but had never actually appointed a representative to the Council, were the only two Scottish Universities to withhold financial support. A Joint Council memorandum drafted in 1974 included the clause:

In 1980 the Universities, disappointed of completion in the 1970s, threatened withdrawal of support if a firm end date were not established. The Conference of the Scottish Universities Courts made it clear that it would be unlikely that the Universities would continue to support the Dictionary after 1988, a year after the Carnegie Trust had said it would terminate its financial support. It was undeniable that the editing was taking too long. The calculations of Aitken and Stevenson proved that this date could not be met following the traditional methods, and they devised a plan to finish DOST by means of what they called the ‘OED-Dependent Method.’ This consisted of basing dictionary entries solely on the equivalent entry in OED:

We accept OED’s sense-analysis and definitions as given and simply assign our quotations as best we can to their places in the OED scheme, providing our own definitions only for those additional words and applications which we cannot fit into the OED scheme...And we propose to offer no etymological note and to undertake no research to ensure the precision of definitions or to provide encyclopedic notes and comments beyond those already in OED. But we would continue to provide exemplification at least as copious as now of all words, senses (according to OED’s analysis), forms and collocations, with all their distributions.[10]

2. ... to complete the editing of the Dictionary by 1994 and allow for a further period of about a year for checking the press-prepared material and for proof-reading.
3. ... to use a much lowered standard of lexicographical analysis which would present, for T-Z, only those Older Scottish forms and meanings not already recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. This would therefore be an Older Scots supplement to the OED; it would enable the Dictionary to be “completed” earlier than 1994.

In the meantime a crisis of another sort arose with the publisher, Chicago University Press. This exacerbated matters, though it did not actually cause the crisis as had the problem of publication in 1950. The basic problem was still the same: the scale of the Dictionary had doubled, at least, in comparison with what was envisaged in 1929. By the end of R, roughly the point reached in 1981, the relationship Aitken had calculated in 1953 of 120 pages of DOST for every 376 pages of OED had become closer to 176 pages of OED. So between February and April 1981, Chicago University Press withdrew as publisher.

Aitken’s assessment of option (c), which had undergone a trial period in the intervening months, was that completion by this method would be two to two and a half times faster than by the other methods proposed, and that it would, therefore, be conceivable to complete the editing by 1987-8. He considered, however, that in larger entries there would be considerable loss of quality. The Joint Council invited a distinguished panel of lexicographers and scholars of Older Scots consisting of Dr R. W. Burchfield, Dr A. Fenton, Professor D. Fox (University of Toronto), Mr P. G. W. Glare (Oxford University Press), Dr R. J. Lyall and Dr J. L. Robinson (Middle English Dictionary) to report on the editorial policy of the Dictionary and recommend a way forward. Their report, received in September 1981, was that the OED-Dependent method of editing was a distinctly inferior option.

The proposal was also aired by Aitken at the Third International Conference on Scottish Language and Literature, (Medieval and Renaissance), held in Stirling, in July 1981 in the course of his paper ‘DOST: How we make it and what’s in it’. The Conference contained a representative sample of the scholars most intimately reliant on DOST, those best able to judge the losses that would be sustained were it to be completed according to the OED-Dependent method. Their findings were reported on the front page of The Scotsman:[11]

By November 1981 Aberdeen University Press (AUP) had expressed an interest in publishing DOST. Negotiations continued throughout 1982 and an agreement was signed in February 1983, whereby AUP was granted the right to publish the rest of DOST. AUP installed a microcomputer in the DOST offices and from then until 1994 edited copy with a minimal level of tagging was prepared for printing in-house and recorded for the first time in electronic form.

PHASE III 1981-1994

The 1980s started inauspiciously with the crisis of 1981 and promised worse with the imminent retirement of both the editors who had brought the project through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Aitken retired in January 1983 and was re-appointed, part-time, as a University Fellow. Later in the same year he reduced his hours still further and Stevenson became Editor-in-chief in December 1983. At this point two and a quarter editors were expected to finish the rest of DOST – the bulk of S and the whole of T-Z. By the end of 1985 Stevenson would have retired, leaving Aitken, part-time, and due to retire himself in 1986, and Mr H. D. Watson, who had been appointed as recently as 1979. A completion date of 1988 was clearly out of the question: as the sole editor Watson would not complete the task within his lifetime. In 1984 Mrs M. G. Dareau, who had been on DOST staff as an assistant editor from 1967 to 1973, and again from 1977 to 1979, was re-appointed. Thus when Aitken retired in 1986, the editorial staff consisted of Watson and Dareau who, from her time on DOST in the late 1960s and 1970s, was experienced in both editing from raw copy and revising but was part-time and on an annually renewable contract.

In 1984 the charitable organisation, The Friends of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, was set up to help with fund raising. This initiative grew directly out of the concern felt by scholars at the possibility, made public in 1981, that DOST might founder. In November 1981 Aitken informed the Joint Council that Dr Alexander Fenton (Director of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland), Mr Paul Scott (Secretary of the Advisory Council for the Arts in Scotland) and Mrs Felicity Riddy (Senior Lecturer in English Studies in the University of Stirling) had offered their assistance in setting up the ‘Friends’. In March 1984 The Friends of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue was launched under the Presidency of the Countess of Strathmore. It was administered by a distinguished body of Trustees[12] under the Chairmanship of Mr Paul Scott and with Dr Fenton as Honorary Secretary and Treasurer. It is due especially to Fenton’s enthusiastic advocacy of the Dictionary and tireless efforts in fund-raising that the Friends succeeded in their self-appointed task. By the end of the decade they had raised enough money from a variety of funding sources[13] to maintain in post a part-time editor (Dareau) and a full-time editorial assistant/editor (Miss K.L. Pike, whose employment was made full-time from September 1984 on an annually renewable contract) as well as providing a number of short term clerical posts.

Watson became Editor-in-chief in 1985 on the retirement of Stevenson. He had at that point six years experience of lexicography having, like Stevenson, come to it from teaching. The years between the crisis of 1981 and Watson’s assumption of overall authority had seen no basic changes in editorial methodology or routine. In 1981 the question of using word processing technology as part of the editorial process was investigated, but it was quickly realised that on-screen editing was not feasible. It was recognised that the process of editing required the physical presence of citation slips, the pieces of paper on which individual quotations are recorded, so that all the quotations for a given word can be sorted and re-sorted with maximum ease. The time-consuming aspect of lexicography is the thought and research that goes into the process, and only long years of experience can shorten that.

Watson was assiduous in applying the methodology passed on to him by Aitken and Stevenson, which meant that the conditions that had provoked the crisis of 1981 simply continued in existence. Dareau had returned to DOST in 1984 after a period as an editor on CSD. During the second half of the 1980s her experience led gradually to her becoming responsible for the revising stage of editing. From 1987 Pike became the third member of the editorial team. The anomalous situation with regard to responsibility for edited copy (Dareau) and overall responsibility for the Dictionary (Watson) was recognised in 1988 when both were re-titled Senior Editor, with Watson retaining administrative responsibility and the title Director.

In 1993 the collapse of AUP added renewed publication difficulties to DOST’s other problems. They were resolved with a return to OUP, DOST’s printer during the years with Chicago University Press, as publisher. Although the relationship DOST had enjoyed with AUP had been beneficial in every way, publication by the major publisher of reference works in the United Kingdom seemed to bode well for the final stage of DOST and there was a hope that the publication of the paper version might lead on to an electronic version similar to the electronic OED.

Throughout the 1980s the main preoccupation of the Joint Council continued to be DOST’s financial situation. From 1981 the Universities had refused to maintain any more than one editor and one editorial assistant, so alternative sponsorship was required for any additional posts. The Friends, of course, now shared the financial burden, and continued to maintain two posts. However this contribution was always precarious. During this period also there were a number of valuable private benefactions, one of which funded a further editorial assistant post. In 1986 the Royal Society of Edinburgh agreed to support the Dictionary for three years at the rate of £4000 per annum.

An average of three editorial and two editorial assistant or clerical posts had been maintained from 1955 to 1985 and again from 1989. However, from the mid-1980s until the end of the project only one editorial post and one editorial assistant post were permanent. All other staff were employed on fixed term contracts just as Aitken had been in the 1950's. This situation prevailed until the end of the project.[14]

In a letter addressed to Dr Victor Skretkowicz of the Department of English in the University of Dundee, Convener of the Joint Council, dated 26th November 1993,[15] Dareau took stock of the situation with regard to editing. At that date the first editing of S was almost finished. Dareau suggested that a completion time of 12 years would be necessary for the 84 drawers remaining of unedited slips for T-Z. Skretkowicz had succeeded Professor John MacQueen as Convener of the Joint Council in 1993. He instituted a Review of the editorial methods and management of DOST in relation to the costs to completion of the project.

The Review was required for the purposes of fund raising by Professor Alexander Fenton, Chairman of The Friends of DOST. It provides a long overdue examination of the editorial policy and of the procedures of editing and production. The first Part of DOST was published in 1931. The only interim Review was in 1981.[16]

The Review was carried out in March 1994. The Review panel consisted of: Professor R.E. Asher, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics (University of Edinburgh), Mr A. Benbow, Director of Dictionaries (Oxford University Press), Dr C. Macafee, Lecturer in the Department of English (University of Aberdeen) and Dr V. Skretkowicz, Convener of the Joint Council (University of Dundee), with Miss Lesley S. Brown, Editor-in-Chief of the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as Consultant.

The aims of the Review were:

The result of their deliberations was the proposal that funding might be easier to obtain if a completion date of 2000 were to be guaranteed.

Dr Robert Burchfield, then editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, served on the 1981 Review. On 18 February 1994 he wrote from New Zealand, ‘DOST must be finished somehow, and I very much hope that the means to do this by the year 2000 can be found.’ Professor Fenton, Chairman of the Friends, has also urged completion during that year.[18]

However, it was unanimously agreed that the DOST published post-Review must maintain the quality of that published before. The solution proposed in 1981 was not an option. It was hoped that the time saving required on the production side would be made largely by employing a data-entry agency to key the edited copy from slips. An extended trial conducted with SPI (Technologies) Ltd demonstrated the practicality of this approach and a contract covering the keying and three phases of corrections for some 180,000 citation slips (in fact the text runs to 204,000 slips) was agreed. Although SPI is based in Manila in the Philipines and all the work was done there, the company's European technical and marketing office is in Irvine in Ayrshire. This ensured close liaison between the two organisations and the effectiveness of SPI's contribution to the overall quality of the Dictionary cannot be overstated.

An important consequence of keying the material at a relatively early stage in the process was the capability that was gained to sort the quotations electronically. The extensive verification of the quotation material required prior to publication was greatly accelerated by this ability to check all the quotations from a single text at the same time.
The electronic link established between Edinburgh and Manila significantly eased the transfer of files between the sites.
However, the challenge of speeding up the editing still remained. The editors’ response to the Review document, made in September 1994, indicates how they saw this:

We have carefully addressed the specific points made by the Review and our responses will demonstrate to all those interested in the future of DOST our commitment to drive the project in a new direction to achieve completion by the end of the year 2000.[19]

It was excessively clear to the editorial team that there was no time to waste. As soon as S was completed in August 1994 a simple calculation was made, dividing the time available by the work to be done. This gave a figure of 18 days as the time available for editing each half drawer of the 84 drawers of raw slips for T-Z. This crude calculation gave the target that must be aimed at. Such a rate of editing would have to be achieved, and then sustained over the six year period to 2000. New editing guidelines including a discard rate aiming at fifty per cent were instituted,[20] and to test the hypothesis Dareau started editing T on the 23rd of August. The first stretch of edited copy deriving from the first half drawer of slips was completed on the 15th of September, precisely 18 days. Pike and Watson produced their first copy according to the new schedule soon afterwards. The editors’ response to the Review included a statement of what would be required if the 2000 deadline were to be met:

To complete the fascicles of T-Z by 2000 we must edit two fascicles per year. This means one fascicle every eighteen months for each Editor. At present we are testing the hypothesis that this is possible by editing the first part of T in the fashion outlined above. By the second week of November when the period we have given ourselves for this test is up we should each have edited a sizeable sample of untouched material. If we can do this, and at present we believe we are on target, then we can claim with assurance that we can achieve the desired end date.[21]

There was certainly very little slack in the system; but there were some benefits that had not been available prior to the Review. Certain suggestions made by the reviewers had a particularly important bearing on achieving completion in 2000. These were: that a Project Manager be appointed to maintain an overview of the progress of the project as a whole; that a production schedule be devised; and that a system of performance indicators, assessment and feedback be adhered to.

By the end of 1994, Professor William Gillies of the Department of Celtic in the University of Edinburgh had been appointed Project Manager. Mr William Aitken, Secretary of the Joint Council, formerly Director of Management Information Services in the University of Edinburgh, took on responsibility for the budget. The production schedule drawn up by the staff in the months immediately succeeding the Review was monitored and refined in collaboration with Aitken. A monthly, and towards the end of the project, weekly, schedule was drawn up by Aitken on the basis of his discussions with the staff and checked regularly in the light of actual progress. It served to demonstrate to the Joint Council and to the Universities that the demanding targets set in 1994 were in fact being achieved. Aitken was also responsible for overseeing the increased computing aspects of the project. Gillies and Aitken together looked after much of the day to day management of the project. They also fulfilled the commitment to attract further external funding. Skretkowicz also worked on seeking further funding. Relieving the Editors of these duties was one of the crucial differences from earlier times and freed the staff to concentrate fully on the editorial task.

The quality and size of the team was also critical. It consisted of the three full-time editors and one full-time and two part-time editorial assistants (Miss E. M. Finlayson, Mrs H. G. Bree and Miss M. B. McNeill). The team combined size and experience to a greater degree than at any time in the past. This point relating to the importance of experience had been made by Aitken in 1980[22]:

Some remarks [were made]...that one could buy three or more junior editors for the price of two seniors and that younger people worked faster than older. The implication of the former and the fact of the latter are untrue in the context of DOST (or any other similar dictionary, such as MED[23]), at least if any regard at all is given to quality. More experienced persons in fact produce acceptable results much faster, because they already know much the junior has to find out ad hoc, because they are more skilled at analysis and at the devising of definitions and because they have confidence in their findings where a junior hesitates and vacillates.

The solution of replacing more experienced, more ‘expensive’ staff by ‘cheaper’ juniors was also suggested in 1994; but the view expressed by Aitken prevailed and, over the subsequent six years, during which the team of editors remained unchanged, was vindicated. Among the editorial assistants there was less stability: there was one retirement in 1996 (Miss M. B. McNeill) and one replacement in the same year (Mrs M.A.R. Martin, formerly an editor on CSD). Three further short-term posts were established in in the period 1999-2001: Dr D. Tugwell was appointed in March 1999 and replaced by Miss T. Gribben in January 2000 and Dr G. H. M. Miller was appointed in July 2000.

In 1996 a follow-up Review took place. Since the first Review, new management procedures had been set up, editorial practices had been adapted so as to allow completion without compromising quality, and technology had been introduced to speed up the processes necessary to bring the copy to publication. It was appropriate that the result of these procedures, especially with regard to the quality of the post-1994 dictionary, should be tested by a further Review. The outcome of this Review is summarised in the report drawn up by the Review Panel, Professor Emeritus R. E. Asher of the University of Edinburgh and Professor A. A. MacDonald of the University of Groningen:

The high-level objectives of this review were to establish whether the changes recommended by the previous review in 1994 had been implemented and, in consequence, whether the target of completion in 2000 is likely to be achieved. The reviewers report that they were most favourably impressed with the progress made by the members of the DOST Team since 1994, and are pleased to state with confidence that:

a. the dictionary is now likely to be completed on time and,

b. the high quality of scholarship can be maintained throughout the remaining stages.

The Conclusion to this Review was as follows:

The reviewers found that the actions taken in response to the recommendations of the 1994 Review had been very effective. They were impressed by the realistic and constructive attitude of the staff and management of the project, both in terms of morale and commitment. The target for completion of DOST remains 2000. The reviewers believe this is an achievable target and, further, that this should include publication of one volume per year with the final volume appearing in 2000. This would be a most commendable monument to Scottish scholarship.

As a result of this Review the Universities affirmed their willingness to fund the project to completion. The funding situation was somewhat eased by events in 1999 when the endeavours of the Management Team, charged in 1994 to pursue fund-raising, bore fruit with an Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) grant of £155,000, with a grading of Alpha+. An application to the Heritage Lottery Fund also yielded a sum of £34,000.

In 1998, in keeping with modern practice, DOST created its own site on the World Wide Web. It is to be found at www.arts.ed.ac.uk/dost.

Editing was completed in early December 2000 and all copy finally dispatched to OUP by mid-July 2001.

As mentioned above, since 1953, the work of the Dictionary has been carried on at 27 George Square in Edinburgh. Whilst support from all the participating universities, viz., Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Stirling, has shown a generous and genuinely national effort for a project of national importance, the hospitality of Edinburgh University, the host university, has in addition supplied support for the day to day needs of the Dictionary. The premises in George Square, charged at a rental well below commercial rates, has ensured security of tenure and the many benefits of working in an academic environment with ready access to colleagues and services such as the Library and Computing Services. The University, as employer of the staff, has provided appropriate support services. Most significant has been the support from the nearest neighbour of the Dictionary, the School of Scottish Studies. The staff of the School, from its inception, have proved valued colleagues. Indeed from 1988 to 1992 the Director of the School, Professor John MacQueen was Convener of the Joint Council, and his successor Professor Alexander Fenton was one of the founders, Honorary Secretary, and Treasurer of the Friends. The current Director, Dr Margaret M. Mackay, has continued the tradition, always giving generous support, not only to the work of the Dictionary, but also to its staff as colleagues over the years of her tenure and, especially, in their more recent initiatives to find a future role for Scottish lexicography.

As completion approached, the DOST Team and the Joint Council thought more about what would come after DOST. A Colloquium of representatives of all of DOST’s user groups was asked to contribute to a discussion of where Scottish lexicography should direct its efforts at the beginning of twenty-first century. These meetings, as well as other concurrent initiatives within the School of Scottish Studies, led to a proposal for an Institute for the Languages of Scotland. This was conceived as an umbrella group which would foster work on many levels and within all the languages that are or have been contributors to Scotland’s culture. It received wide support and remains an aspiration, so that the co-operation that is clearly desired among participants in all linguistic fields can find suitable expression.

In a more local initiative a Liaison Group was set up to further co-operation between DOST and SND. As a result of its deliberations, Skretkowicz, as Convener of the Joint Council and a member of staff of the Department of English in the University of Dundee, made an application to the AHRB for funds to digitise DOST and SND. The successful outcome of this bid has provided a grant of £319,596 over three years for a joint project to make DOST and SND available in electronic form on the World Wide Web. The production of the preliminary stage of the electronic Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) commenced in February 2001.

At the same time the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) which has supported both DOST and SND over many years encouraged the coming together of these major Scottish lexicographical entities. SAC’s recognition of the national importance of these bodies has been a major influence in the ongoing strategy which, all being well, will lead to the inception of a single new body charged with the furtherance of Scottish lexicography in all its aspects.

Thus it is with the sense of coming full circle that Craigie’s letter to Grant quoted in Phase I above is recollected. Craigie had hoped that DOST and SND, although dealing with the language in different ways, might be organised so as to allow the connections between the older language and the modern to be clarified. The co-operation offered within such a body surely fulfils Craigie’s vision, and although he could not imagine the unity of DOST and SND in 1916 at the point of conception of both SND and his own dictionary, DOST, whose completion is celebrated now, such an outcome would no doubt have given him enormous satisfaction.

HISTORY OF DOST[1]

PHASE I 1919-1948

PHASE II 1948-1981

PHASE III 1981-1994