It is one of the monuments to the patient persistence of scholarship and one of the most sterling illustrations of that strange piety which only scholars can understand.
See The Ring of Words, behind which are editors of the OED, for Tolkien's contributions and his own language-building of Middle Earth.
The phrase nigger in the woodpile see is said to derive from an incident in the U.
I got the feeling that this little three-letter word might be the most useful and versatile in the entire English language.