Finishing a Medieval-English Book : Language: The dictionary has taken more than 60 years so far, and the team of scholars has reached the letter <i> W</i> . They hope to be done by 1995.

On the third floor of an ordinary brick-and-glass building on the edge of the University of Michigan campus, directly above Cactus Jack’s Restaurant and the Great Lakes Cycling shop, a group of scholars is quietly nearing the end of a monumental task.

They and their predecessors, 20th-Century equivalents of medieval monks, have been at it for more than 60 years. In 1988, the English department threw a party for them to celebrate a particularly important milestone--completion of the letter S . Since then, they have plowed ahead and are about to plunge into the mysteries of W . If all goes well, they will finish in 1995.

They are creating a dictionary that certainly will never be published in a pocket-book edition. The Middle English Dictionary (MED) already runs 12,000 pages and is likely to total 15,000 pages when finished.

The extraordinary project began here in 1930 and is a descendant of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which took decades to produce before its completion in 1928. Both trace development of the language and illustrate evolution of words and their meanings over the centuries with quotations from books and other works of the time.

For the MED, time begins in 1100, just after the Norman Conquest, and ends in 1500, about the time of the invention of printing and the dawn of modern English, province of the OED. The MED includes the Age of Geoffrey Chaucer, whose poetry, taught in high school and college English classes, has served as the first, and in many cases only, skirmish with Middle English for most Americans.

In charge of this unusual enterprise is a soft-spoken English professor recruited here in 1982 from Indiana University. Robert E. Lewis, 57, is the MED’s fifth editor-in-chief and the only one still alive.

He supervises 18 people, including 12 editors who work on individual words, producing definitions with illustrative quotations. Their work is reviewed and revised, if necessary, by Lewis and his senior associate, Mary Jane Williams, before a production staff of five enters the final product into computers in preparation for printing.

The work is slow and painstaking, and the letter S party was held for good reason. That is the longest section in both the Middle English and modern English dictionaries and took six years to complete. Some editors have spent more than a year on a single word. The verb setten (to set), the longest single MED entry, covers 28 pages.

The letter W will be no slouch. It is likely to be the second longest entry and contains several difficult words, including will and with, that have complex histories.

Raw material for the dictionary is kept in what look like large shoe boxes. Each contains about 4,000 slips of paper, and on each slip is written a quotation using a Middle English word. The numbers are staggering--more than 600 boxes, including 99 for S. They contain more than 2 million slips of paper that eventually will produce a dictionary of 70,000 to 80,000 words.

Editors sift through this material, employing a wooden “sorting board” that contains 35 pockets to organize slips of paper by chronology and other factors. Editors struggle to produce definitions with illustrative quotations for each often strange-looking word.

“It’s not a solitary job at all,” said Doug Moffat, an editor whose board contained, among other items, a baseball trading card of Mookie Wilson in a Toronto Blue Jays uniform. The editors try to help each other in pursuit of just the right definition. “We talk all the time,” Moffat said.

It also can be “stultifyingly boring at times,” Moffat said. “There are many mechanical tasks. When you get a really big word, there is a feeling you’re never going to get out of this.”

Some of the raw material dates to the OED project at Oxford University. Other quotations were gathered at Stanford and Cornell universities before the Modern Language Assn. decided in 1930 to consolidate the project here.

For the first 22 years of its existence, the MED project produced nothing tangible as more quotations were gathered from Middle English works and the massive material was organized. In 1952, when Lewis was a college freshman, the first 128-page booklet of words and their definitions, known as a fascicle, was published.

From 1952 to 1984, about two fascicles a year were published. Since 1984, when computer technology was introduced here, the average has been four a year.

Not only has this project taken more than sixty years, but it also has cost more than $10 million, about half from the university and $2.5 million each from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Why such time and money for what Lewis calls “a dead language”? His answer is a little like George Leigh Mallory’s reply to the question about why people climb Mt. Everest.

“To be honest,” Lewis said, “it’s there, and it hasn’t been done yet, and if one is going to be complete in one’s reconstruction of the past, one has to do it. If we weren’t doing it, there would be a gap in our knowledge.”