Content area
Full Text
RR 2000/288
Oxford English Dictionary Online
Oxford University Press
Oxford
2000
online database
www.oed.com
Keywords Language, United Kingdom
If the OED did not exist, it would have to be invented: thanks to the scholarly foresight of James Murray and his late Victorian contemporaries, not to mention the syndics of the Oxford University Press who had to approve the little matter of funding such an enormous project (and just how enormous and long-running nobody appreciated until work was under way), it was invented, at the right time intellectually if perhaps not technologically; and the rest is history. It was eventually "completed" in the 1930s, but within the realisation that such a project can never be completed. The dictionary has from the first been subject to constant revision, leading to supplements, then computerisation in the mid 1980s, and a much heralded and well-documented second edition in 1989. The earlier history of the Dictionary, and its revision, were treated in Burchfield and Aarslef (1988), amid a range of publicity surrounding the computerisation in the trade press, and in a referenced article by James Rettig (1992). Oxford University Press seem to be trying to hedge their bets, but there is every likelihood that the second will have been the last complete printed edition. Modern and ever-developing online and Internet technologies and accessibility, and the ever-quickening pace of change in English vocabulary (especially in a world context) now combine to the logical Web online version before us as the natural present and future of this work.
The sheer size of the project is deceptive without all those enormous volumes filling our shelves. The statistics are impressive, if ultimately meaningless: 60 million words describing 275,000 terms with 2.4 million quotations. More than 9,000 entries from the last decade are incorporated for the first time. The sources are ever wider in range, both geographically and of types of material. So the catch phrases (nice but dim), the "techie" words, the popular culture (d'n'b -- whatever that is), the trendy (third way), as well as those terms which have come and gone (remember Lymeswold?) are all here. World English is just that, with terms from Australia and New Zealand, the Caribbean, Africa, East Asia, India and South Asia, South and Central America, and...