Coming across this passage for the first time, a casual reader might assume that this is someone writing about William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words. But in fact it is Empson himself, reviewing Raymond Williams's Keywords for the New York Review of Books in October 1977.

Besides the term ‘keywords’ itself, someone looking for likeness between the two books might highlight the shared idea of analysable structures of lexical meaning (especially the sense of embedded or compacted social doctrines inherent in the histories of words). There is also a common interest in the strengths - but also the limitations - of the Oxford English Dictionary (often referred to by Empson under its name at the time of first publication, in instalments, between 1884 and 1928: the New English Dictionary (NED)). Williams approvingly cites Empson's assessment of the Dictionary as a ‘majestic object’ (1983, p. 39); and for both writers, any work on the historical meanings of words is heavily dependent on it.