Charles Kay Ogden (June 1, 1889 Fleetwood - March 21, 1957 London) was a British linguist, philosopher, and writer, now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English, a constructed language, his primary activity from 1925 until his death. Basic English is an auxiliary international language of 850 words comprising a system covering everything necessary for everyday purposes. To promote Basic English, Ogden founded the Orthological Institute, from orthology, the abstract term he proposed for its work (see orthoepeia). June 1 is the 152nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (153rd in leap years), with 213 days remaining. ... 1889 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... March 21 is the 80th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (81st in leap years). ... 1957 (MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Basic English is a constructed language with a small number of words created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). ... An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose phonology, grammar and vocabulary are specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture as with natural languages. ... Orthoepeia means the correct use of words, from the Greek orth- + -epos, correct + word, speech. ...

Educated at Magdalene College Cambridge, Ogden obtained the M.A. in 1915. He founded the Cambridge Magazine in 1912 while still an undergraduate, editing it until it ceased publication in 1922. It evolved into an organ of international comment on politics and the war. A survey of the foreign press filled more than half of each issue, and its circulation rose to over 20,000. Ogden often used the pseudonym Adelyne More in his journalism. The magazine also included literary contributions by Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Bennett. In 1923, he took over the editorship of the psychological journal Psyche. He founded and edited two major series of monographs, "The History of Civilisation" and "The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method"; the latter series included about 100 volumes after one decade. He edited and wrote a number of monographs on a variety of subjects. A pseudonym (Greek: false name) is a fictitious name used by an individual as an alternative to his or her legal name. ... Siegfried Sassoon, 1916 Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC (September 8, 1886 – September 1, 1967) was an English poet and author. ... John Edward Masefield (1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967), was a British poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. ... For other people called Thomas Hardy, see Thomas Hardy (disambiguation) Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was a novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement, who delineated characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. ... George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 2, 1950) was an Irish playwright and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. ... Arnold Bennett, British novelist Enoch Arnold Bennett (May 27, 1867-March 27, 1931) was a British novelist. ...

Although neither a trained philosopher nor an academic, Ogden had a material impact on British academic philosophy. He helped translate Wittgenstein's Tractatus. His most durable work is his monograph (with I. A. Richards) titled The Meaning of Meaning (1923), which went into many editions. This book, which straddled the boundaries among linguistics, literary analysis, and philosophy, drew attention to the significs of Victoria Lady Welby (whose disciple Ogden was) and the semiotics of Charles Peirce. A major step in the "linguistic turn" of 20th century British philosophy, The Meaning of Meaning set out principles for understanding the function of language and described the so-called semantic triangle. It included the inimitable phrase "The gostak distims the doshes." Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), pictured here in 1930, made influential contributions to Logic and the philosophy of language, critically examining the task of conventional philosophy and its relation to the nature of language. ... Ivor Armstrong Richards (February 26, 1893-1979) was an influential literary critic and rhetorician. ... Any theory of meaning attempts to define the meaning of meaning. ... 1923 (MCMXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Victoria, Lady Welby (also styled the Hon. ... Semiotics, or semiology, is the study of signs, both individually and grouped in sign systems. ... Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Santiago Peirce (pronounced purse), (September 10, 1839, Cambridge, Massachusetts – April 19, 1914, Milford, Pennsylvania) was an American polymath. ... The phrase the gostak distims the doshes was coined in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning. ...

Ogden ran a network of bookshops in Cambridge, also selling art by the Bloomsbury Group. One such bookshop was looted on the day WWI ended. He was a voracious book collector; his incunabula, manuscripts, papers of the Brougham family, and Jeremy Bentham collection were purchased by University College London. The balance of his enormous personal library was purchased after his death by the University of California - Los Angeles. The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set or just Bloomsbury, as its adherents (members is probably too formal a designation) would generally refer to it, was an English group of artists and scholars that existed from around 1905 until around World War II. // History The group began as an informal social... Jeremy Bentham (IPA: ) (February 15, 1748 – June 6, 1832) was an English gentleman, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. ... University College London, commonly known as UCL, is one of the colleges that make up the University of London. ... The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university located in the residential area of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ...

References

Ogden, C. K., and Richard, I. A., 1949. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, 10th ed. With supplementary essays by Bronislaw Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank. Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1st ed., 1923.

External link

• Excerpts from W. Terrence Gordon's Ogden biography
• Ogden papers collected by his lawyer, Mark Haymon
• Ogden's 850 Basic English Words on Wiktionary
• Ogden's Basic English Pages