As a young girl, Barbara Cordell quietly toted boxes of dictionaries into the house from her father’s car.
Warren Cordell had become a passionate collector of the word books, and his collection rapidly multiplied. Barbara’s mother, Suzanne, preferred an orderly house, uncluttered by cartons of dictionaries. So each time Warren drove home with a new shipment of dictionaries, he’d leave them in his car until his wife went to sleep. Then he’d wake the kids, and enlist their help in carrying the books inside to his stockpile in the basement, amassed during the late 1950s and early ’60s.
“Actually, it was fun to be part of that rather clandestine but fascinating gathering of these dictionaries,” Barbara, now 71, recalled fondly by phone earlier this month from her home in Palo Alto, California.
That stash of rare, historic books blossomed into what is now the Cordell Collection of Dictionaries inside Cunningham Memorial Library at Indiana State University, Warren Cordell’s alma mater.
The climate-controlled rooms house 30,000 volumes of word books. Lexicographers and bibliographers regard it as the finest dictionary collection in the Western Hemisphere.
“We vie with Oxford University in England for the largest dictionary collection in the world,” said Cinda May, chair of Special Collections at ISU’s library.
Think of it this way: Monday is National Dictionary Day, celebrated every Oct. 16, the birthday of Noah Webster. The first copy of Webster’s iconic string of dictionaries rolled off the presses in 1806. That book is in the Cordell Collection.
So are hundreds of subsequent editions of Webster’s (and its successor, Merriam-Webster’s) dictionaries. So is a complete run — more than 280 editions, dating back to 1755 — of Samuel Johnson’s “The Dictionary of the English Language.” And there’s much, much more.
Publications in the Cordell Collection span parts of seven centuries, from 1471 to 2017. Many are one-of-a-kind manuscripts, as in handwritten. That includes a grammar dictionary of the Telugu dialect in India, compiled by a Christian missionary. Some Cordell texts are incunables, books printed (rather than handwritten) between 1454 (when the first copies of the Gutenberg Bible became available) and 1501. Fewer than 800,000 incunables survive worldwide, May explained, “and we have 24 of them.”
The assortment even contains the world’s smallest dictionary, a postage stamp-size, leatherbound book published in 1890.
“The collection has a lot of rich content,” said David Vancil, who nurtured its growth as curator and special collections chair from 1986 until his retirement in 2012.
Unlocking word mysteries
It attracts lexicographers and scholars from around the planet. Dictionaries from centuries past contain words that have since disappeared and original definitions of everyday words that offer clues to their origins. So, the Cordell Collection stands as a mecca for etymologists (people who study words). “You can come here to find everything,” May said.
Vancil fielded a call years ago from a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, seeking the definition of the word “felon” in the 1600s. Vancil found it in the “Table Alphabeticall,” a 1604 dictionary by Englishman Robert Cawdrey. In those days, a felon was a wart on a finger.
“The Cordell Collection is vast,” Vancil said. Its roots sprouted during Warren Cordell’s upbringing in early 1900s Terre Haute, alongside six siblings. They lived in a flat above their father’s grocery store. Warren was born there in 1913, the same year of the community endured an epic Easter weekend tornado and flood. The family lived modestly, but “had a fairly scholarly library,” Cordell wrote in his 1975 essay, “The Great Dictionary Quest.” “And at an early age, word meanings and dictionaries fascinated me.”
As Cordell’s daughter Barbara put it, “Father was always a very curious person.”
In the late 1920s, Warren took his curiosity to ISU, then known as Indiana State Teachers College, where he majored in physics and math and graduated in 1933. He later studied statistics and business at the University of Chicago, and started a 41-year career with A.C.
Nielsen, the famous research and information company. Cordell served as a Nielsen vice president, chief statistical officer and Washington liaison.
And he kept on collecting dictionaries at the home near Chicago where he and Suzanne raised their family. He tried to pinpoint the factors “at work to produce a dictionary bibliomaniac,” Cordell wrote in the essay. “Perhaps in the hidden recesses of my mind was the belief that physical acquisition of a book is tantamount to the mental acquisition of its contents. Perhaps collecting dictionaries replaced a thwarted childhood ambition to become a language scholar.”
Regardless, a fascination with words permeated his life. During Sunday dinners, Cordell would toss out language trivia bits to his kids. “He would look for a word like ‘tuxedo,’ and say, ‘Do you know where that comes from?’” Barbara recalled. (It’s connected to Tuxedo Park, a New York country club where dinner jackets with tails were first worn, but the park drew its name from a bygone Algonquin Indian tribe there.)
His pursuit of relic dictionaries and word books “that contributed to the development of the English language” expanded his collection into the thousands. Of course, his wife, Suzanne, was well aware of its expanse, and even drew inspiration from Warren’s work to start her own collection of “fore-edge” books, which bear paintings on the edge of their pages, Barbara explained.
A flash flood swamped the family’s basement in 1967, destroying 200 books and 40 dictionaries. The loss was “traumatic,” Cordell wrote. “This experience made me realize that I had a social responsibility as custodian of these old scholarly works.” He decided to find a “saferhome” for the collection at a university. ISU was preparing to build a new library (which became Cunningham Memorial in 1974), and reserved a room specifically for his collection. The university anxiously accepted the first of several phases of dictionary and word book donations in 1969.
It became the Warren N. and Suzanne B. Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.
“He was thrilled, because that was his alma mater,” Barbara said.
The contributions continued in the 1970s, and after Warren died unexpectedly in 1980, Suzanne donated the remainder of her husband’s books. She passed away in 2002. The Cordell family remains involved in activities related to the collection, which gained added space following a 1986 renovation. That’s the year Vancil, who had his own (not historical) small dictionary collection, came to ISU from Louisiana to guide the special collections department.
Vancil and lexicographer Edward Gates spent two months in ‘86 reshelving the Cordell dictionaries and word books. “I was just overwhelmed by what I saw,” said Vancil, now 70.
‘People can look at anything’
Today, the collection includes separate rooms for word books before 1900 and after, with study space for researchers including those awarded the annual Cordell fellowship (which covers a scholar’s travel costs).
The people at ISU “were so grateful for all this and are so engaged with it,” Barbara said. “And, they wanted to add more books.”
ISU has added between 50 and 75 titles a year since to the Cordells’ original offerings, expanding into word books from various English dialects.
All tell a story beyond a word’s spelling, definition and pronunciation. “While we think of dictionaries as just a place to look up a word, if we think about them at all, they really do represent the time period in which they were printed,” May said.
The compiler of a sportsman’s dictionary from 1778 hand-drew vivid pictures of animals on its pages. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definitions reflected his personal political views and attitudes about social classes, May said. Nathan Bailey’s dictionaries from the early 1700s included a profanity (still common today), and two copies in the Cordell Collection have the word obliterated or physicdally cut out, reflecting “sensibilities” of a past owner centuries ago.
ISU will toast the Cordell Collection at a Nov. 9 fundraiser dinner at Cunningham, featuring the hosts of NPR’s “A Way with Words” radio program. Public interaction with the collection is a university goal, May said. She emphasized that its reading room is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, with just an advance phone call (to 812-2372610) from visitors needed.
“People can come and look at anything,” May said.
Warren Cordell hoped people to experience the books that captivated him. “Father always wanted these to be used,” Barbara Cordell said. “He didn’t want them to be just shelved.
He wanted them to be worked with and learned from.”