The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) contains over 300,000 entries — and that’s just the “main” entries; there are minor entries and subentries galore. There have so far been only two editions of the OED, the first published starting in 1884 (it took until 1928 to finish the whole publication) and the second in 1989. They claim there’s a third edition in the works, so going by their schedule so far it should appear in about 50 years.
The entries in the OED run the gamut from the word “set,” which is the longest entry (that one word, it turns out, is used in 430 different ways) to what is possibly the weirdest entry in the whole dictionary: “etaoin shrdlu.”
“Etaoin shrdlu” sounds like it might be something out of Celtic mythology, but it isn’t. You’re probably thinking of Étaín, the heroine of Tochmarc Étaíne. That’s a story from a manuscript dating from about 1100 called Lebor na hUidre, which means “the book of the dun cow.” Not that it has anything to do with cows of whatever color; the book is printed on parchment supposedly made from the hide of a dun cow. But anyway, Étaín has nothing whatever to do with “etaoin shrdlu,” so never mind.
What “etaoin shrdlu” does have to do with is printing; it’s a sequence of letters in order of the frequency of their appearance in English. Back in the days when printing required metal letters to be arranged in the order they would appear on the printed page (but in mirror image, of course), printers had to keep track of which letters were most likely to be used. When they kept trays of pre-formed metal letters to be arranged by hand, the sequence was known but didn’t mean anything in particular. But when a system was designed that enabled a typesetter to enter the text on a keyboard, and the chosen letters mechanically arranged (even cast-on-demand out of melted lead), “etaoin shrdlu” really came into its own.
The first mechanical typesetting systems — at least the first ones that worked — were introduced in the 1860s as the “Monotype,” “Linotype,” and “Intertype” machines. “Etaoin shrdlu” was the order of keys on the keyboard. Particularly in newspapers, a typesetter (or “compositor”) would sometimes make an error, and to finish the line (there was no “undo” on those machines), would just run a finger down the keys, which were arranged vertically. That would place “etaoin shrdlu” on the line of type. That line was supposed to be discarded, but it wasn’t all that unusual for it to appear in print, at least in the less prominent pages of the newspaper.
Generally only people working in the printing business knew about “etaoin shrdlu,” but the sequence appeared often enough that it appeared in several other places. In 1923 there was a play called The Adding Machine, which had a character named “Shrdlu.” Etaoin shrdlu was also the title of a short story published in 1942, and both “Etaoin” and “Shrdlu” were characters in another story from 1945. There are quite number of these, and they persisted for some time. You might have heard of the computer program available since the 1980s called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing? That has (or at least had) a character named “Etaoin Shrdlu”.
Using hot-lead typesetting machines was sometimes called “typecasting.” At the same time, movie actors are often chosen to play the same sort of part in one movie after another, and that’s called “typecasting” too. The two sorts of “typecasting” have nothing to do with each other, of course, but there are some interesting footnotes about both the word “type” and the word “cast”.
“Type” first appeared in English around the 1400s, based on the Greek word “typos,” meaning “impression” or “dent,” as in a sheet of metal. In English it originally meant “symbol.” By the early 1700s “type” was being used to mean a letter on a metal or wooden block used for printing. Usage of “type” in the sense of the acting version of typecasting, where “type” means a specific form of something is newer, and only appeared in the 1800s.
“Cast” comes from Middle English, when it was adopted from an Old Norse word. It has quite a number of meanings, from “throw” (as in “casting a fishing net”) to “deposit” (as in “casting a vote”) to shed (as in “cast off”), and to “arrange” or “shape” (as in “casting the parts of a play” as well as “casting metal into a shape, such as a letter”). Letters, of course, are also said to be “set” in printing — and by coincidence, while “set” has the most entries of any word in the OED, “cast” isn’t far behind. Both “set” and “cast” are just that type of word, I guess.
