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RR 2015/123 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (8th edition) Edited by Elizabeth Knowles Oxford University Press Oxford 2014 xxvii + 1126 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 966870 0 £30 $50
Also available as an e-book
Keywords Dictionaries, Quotations
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-01-2015-0009
I have always had a nostalgic liking for the Penguin quotations dictionary: I bought a copy of its original edition when I was at school and derived much pleasure, entertainment and instruction from it, or as Winston Churchill put it as reproduced in this Oxford Dictionary: "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations". But in recent times, I think the Oxford Dictionary has come to surpass its various rivals.
One of its first merits is that of regular updating: first published in 1941, it was revised at various intervals up to the fifth edition of 1999 since when new editions have followed regularly at five-year intervals with the last in 2009 (RR 2010/154). The obvious advantage of this schedule is to enable the work to keep pretty well up to date with significant contemporary quotations. That, of course, is a matter of editorial judgement: Among all the sound bites bombarding us from political and other sources, who is to judge what is worth keeping? It is a tricky task: Would one have guessed in 1963 that a pert response to a judge in court by Mandy Rice-Davies ("He would, wouldn't he") would still be quite regularly quoted more than 50 years later? Some quotations owe as much to the identity of the...