The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), published by the Oxford University Press Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative, is a dictionary A dictionary, also referred to as a lexicon, wordbook, or vocabulary, is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a of the English language English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of.^[2] Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. As of December 2008^[update], the editors had completed one quarter of a third edition.^[3]

Entries and relative size

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: 1048576 bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes (106, see prefix mega-) generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000 000", with to store it electronically.^[4] As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appear. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position. Depending on the size and nature of the dictionary or encyclopedia, the entry may include alternative meanings of the word, its, there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect; 249,300 etymologies Etymology is the study of the history of words, where they are from, and how their form and meaning have changed over time; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations A quotation is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed to its original source, and it is indicated by (punctuated with) quotation marks. The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (Second Edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007.^[5]

Despite its impressive size, the OED is neither the world's largest nor earliest dictionary. The Dutch dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is a dictionary of the Dutch language and the largest dictionary in the world in print. It has over 430,000 entries of Dutch words from 1500 to 1921 and the paper edition consists of 43 volumes and close to 50,000 pages. The dictionary was almost 150 years in the making: the first fascicle (A-Aanhaling) was, which has similar aims to the OED, is the largest and it took twice as long to complete. The earliest large dictionary is the Grimm brothers They are among the best-known story tellers of folk tales from Europe, and their work popularized such tales as "Rumpelstiltskin", "Snow White", "Rapunzel", "Cinderella", "Hansel and Gretel", and "The Frog Prince", some of which they had first heard from the Italian Fairy Tale writers' dictionary of the German language The Deutsches Wörterbuch is one of the most important dictionaries of the German language. It is for German what the Oxford English Dictionary is for English, containing detailed historical information about the origin and use over time of German words, with examples taken from actual documents, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca The Accademia della Crusca is an Italian institution that brings together scholars and experts in Italian linguistics and philology. It was founded in Renaissance Florence in 1582 by Antonio Francesco Grazzini, commonly known as "Il Lasca". To this day, the Accademia della Crusca has remained well-known for its mission to maintain the &, which is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian), was published in 1612; the first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française is the official dictionary of the French language in France dates from 1694. The first edition of the official dictionary of Spanish, the Diccionario de la lengua española The Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española or DRAE is the most authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. It is produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española ; the first edition was published in 1780. The most current, twenty-second edition was published in 2001; an advance version of the 23rd (produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone (i.e., Spanish-speaking) nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies. The RAE's emblem is a fiery crucible,) was published in 1780. The Kangxi dictionary The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710. The creator innovated greatly by reusing and confirming the new Zihui system of 214 radicals, since then know as 214 Kangxi radicals, and was eventually published in 1716. The of Chinese was published even earlier, in 1716.

The OED's official policy is to attempt to record a word's most-known usages and variants in all varieties of English past and present, worldwide. Per the 1933 "Preface":

The aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records [ca. AD740] down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang.

It continues:

Hence we exclude all words that had become obsolete by 1150 [the end of the Old English Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon era] ... Dialectal words and forms which occur since 1500 are not admitted, except when they continue the history of the word or sense once in general use, illustrate the history of a word, or have themselves a certain literary currency.

The OED is the focus of much scholarly work about English words. Its headword variant spellings order list influences written English in English-speaking countries.^{[citation needed]}

History

Origins

At first, the dictionary was unconnected to Oxford University but was the idea of a small group of intellectuals in London;^[6] it originally was a Philological Society The Philological Society is the oldest learned society in Great Britain dedicated to the study of language. The society was established in 1842 to "investigate and promote the study and knowledge of the structure, the affinities, and the history of languages" project conceived in London by Richard Chenevix Trench Richard Chenevix Trench was an Anglican archbishop and poet, Herbert Coleridge Herbert "Herbie" Coleridge was a British philologist, technically the first editor of what ultimately became the Oxford English Dictionary, and Frederick Furnivall Frederick James Furnivall , one of the co-creators of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was an English philologist, who were dissatisfied with the current English dictionaries. In June 1857, they formed an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for unlisted and undefined words lacking in current dictionaries. In November, Trench's report was not a list of unregistered words; instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:

• Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
• Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
• Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
• History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
• Inadequate distinction among synonyms Synonyms are different words with identical or very similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn ("with") and onoma (ὄνομα) ("name"). The words car and automobile are synonyms. Similarly, if we talk about a
• Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
• Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.

The Philological Society, however, ultimately realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century. The Society eventually shifted their idea from only words that were not already in English dictionaries to a more comprehensive project. Trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed. On 7 January 1858, the Society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary.^[7] Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. In 1858, the Society agreed to the project in principle, with the title "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles" (NED).

Early editors

Richard Chenevix Trench played the key role in the project's first months, but his ecclesiastical Ecclesiology is the theological study of the Christian church. Specific areas of concern include the church's origin, its relationship to the historical Christ, its role in salvation, its discipline, its destiny, and its leadership career meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time required, easily ten years^{[citation needed]}; he withdrew, and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor.

On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published, and research started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54-pigeon-hole grid. In April 1861, the group published the first sample pages; later that month, the thirty-one-year old Coleridge died of tuberculosis Tuberculosis or TB is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis in humans. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body. It is spread through the air, when people who have the disease cough, sneeze, or spit. Most infections in.

Furnivall then became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, yet temperamentally ill-suited for the work.^[8] Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips had been misplaced.

Recruited assistants handled two tons of quotation slips and other materials. Furnivall understood the need for an efficient excerpting system, and instituted several prefatory projects. In 1864, he founded the Early English Text Society, and in 1868, he founded the Chaucer Society for preparing general benefit editions of immediate value to the dictionary project. The compilation lasted 21 years.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet Henry Sweet was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached James Murray James Augustus Henry Murray was a Scottish lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 until his death, who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing the dictionary. In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year.^[9] The dictionary project finally had a publisher 20 years after the idea was conceived. It would be another 50 years before the entire dictionary was complete.

Despite the participation of some 800 volunteer readers, the technology of paper-and-ink was the major drawback regarding the arbitrary choices of relatively untrained volunteers about "what to read and select" and "what to discard."^{[cite this quote][clarification needed]}

Late in his editorship Murray learned that one prolific reader W. C. Minor William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minors was an American surgeon who made many scholarly contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary while confined to a lunatic asylum was a criminal lunatic.^[10] Minor, a Yale University trained surgeon and military officer in the U.S. Civil War, was confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. It is the best known of the three high-security psychiatric hospitals in England, the other two being Ashworth and Rampton. Scotland has a similar institution, located at Carstairs, officially known as The State Hospital; also called Carstairs Hospital after killing a man in London. The story of Minor and Murray is told in Simon Winchester Simon Winchester, OBE , is a British author and journalist who currently resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and written one novel's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary^[11] (U.S. title – elsewhere The Surgeon of Crowthorne The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester first published in 1998. The American edition is called The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and was published the same year: a tale of murder, madness and the love of words). Minor invented his own quotation-tracking system allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests.

Oxford editors

During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope. Although they had pages printed by publishers, no publication agreement was reached; both the Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted Letters Patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest continually operating book publisher and the Oxford University Press were approached. Finally, in 1879, after two years' negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray, the OUP agreed to publish the dictionary and to pay the editor, Murray, who was also the Philological Society president. The dictionary was to be published as interval fascicles, with the final form in four 6,400-page volumes. They hoped to finish the project in ten years.

Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron Corrugated galvanised iron (colloquially corrugated iron or pailing, commonly abbreviated CGI) is a building material composed of sheets of hot-dip galvanised mild steel, cold-rolled to produce a linear corrugated pattern in them. The corrugations increase the bending strength of the sheet in the direction parallel to the corrugations, but not outbuilding, the "Scriptorium Scriptorium, literally "a place for writing", is commonly used to refer to a room in medieval European monasteries devoted to the copying of manuscripts by monastic scribes. Written accounts, surviving buildings, and archaeological excavations all show, however, that contrary to popular belief[citation needed] such rooms rarely existed:", which was lined with wooden planks, book shelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages: for instance, there were ten times as many quotations for abusion than for abuse.^{[citation needed]} Through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, he appealed for readers who would report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way."^{[cite this quote]} Murray had American philologist and liberal-arts-college A "liberal arts" institution can be defined as a "college or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum." Although what is known today as the liberal arts college began in Europe, the term is professor Francis March Francis Andrew March was an American polymath, academic, philologist, and lexicographer. He graduated from Amherst College in 1845, and received a M.A. degree from Amherst in 1848. He is considered the principal founder of modern comparative linguistics in Anglo-Saxon. March applied the methods of studying the Latin and Greek classics towards the manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium, and by 1882, there were 3,500,000.

The first Dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—-twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society; the 352-page volume, words from A to Ant, cost 12s The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from schilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive from the base skell-, "to ring/resound".6d A penny is a coin or a type of currency (pl. pence) used in several English-speaking countries. It is often the smallest denomination within a currency system or U.S.$3.25. The total sales were a disappointing 4,000 copies.^{[citation needed]}

The OUP saw it would take too long to complete the work with unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were hired and two new demands were made on Murray. The first was that he move from Mill Hill Mill Hill is a place in the London Borough of Barnet. It is a suburb situated 9 miles north west of Charing Cross. Mill Hill was formerly in the historic county of Middlesex until it was absorbed by London and designated NW7, which is, in area, the largest of all the numbered London postal districts. Mill Hill consists of several distinct parts: to Oxford Oxford (pronounced /ˈɒksfərd/ ) is a city, and the county town of Oxfordshire, in South East England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 151,000 living within the district boundary. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre. For a distance; he did, in 1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected on his new property.

Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling he would accelerate his work pace with experience.^{[citation needed]} That turned out not to be so, and Philip Gell of the OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley Henry Bradley was a British philologist and lexicographer of the Victorian era who succeeded James Murray as senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present.[a] in London, beginning in 1888. In 1896, Bradley moved to Oxford University.

Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business concerns—containing costs and speedy production—to the point where the project's collapse seemed likely. Newspapers^[specify] reported the harassment, and public opinion backed the editors. Gell was fired, and the University reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt that the Dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish. Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A-D, H-K, O-P and T, nearly half the finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having completed E-G, L-M, S-Sh, St and W-We. By then two additional editors had been promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing without much trouble. William Craigie Sir William Alexander Craigie was a philologist and a lexicographer, starting in 1901, was responsible for N, Q-R, Si-Sq, U-V and Wo-Wy. Whereas previously the OUP had thought London too far from Oxford, after 1925 Craigie worked on the dictionary in Chicago, where he was a professor. The fourth editor was C. T. Onions Charles Talbut Onions (10 September 1873 – 8 January 1965) was an English grammarian and lexicographer and the fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who, starting in 1914, compiled the remaining ranges, Su-Sz, Wh-Wo and X-Z. It was around this time that J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE , whose surname is pronounced /ˈtɒlkiːn/ (in General American also /ˈtoʊlkiːn/), was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion was employed by the OED, researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range ^[12]; he parodied the principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story Farmer Giles of Ham "Farmer Giles of Ham" is a Medieval fable written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937 and published in 1949. The story describes the encounters between Farmer Giles and a wily dragon named Chrysophylax, and how Giles manages to use these to rise from humble beginnings to rival the king of the land. It is cheerfully anachronistic and light-. Julian Barnes Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize (Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005)). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh also was an employee; he was said^[who?] to dislike the work.

Fascicles

By early 1894 a total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A-B, five for C, and two for E. Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which would eventually become a volume break). At this point it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments: once every three months, beginning in 1895, there would now be a fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s.6d. or $1 U.S. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles.

Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was first used. It then appeared only on the outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else. The 125th and last fascicle, covering words from Wise to the end of W, was published on 19 April 1928, and the full Dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately.

The early modern English prose of Sir Thomas Browne is probably the most frequently quoted source of neologisms in the completed dictionary. William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is the most-quoted woman writer. Collectively, the Bible is the most-quoted work (but in many different translations); the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi.

Oxford English Dictionary and First Supplement

Between 1928 and 1933 enough additional material had been compiled to make a one volume supplement so the dictionary was reissued as the set of 12 volumes and a one-volume supplement in 1933.

Second Supplement and Second Edition

In 1933 Oxford had finally put the Dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However, the English language continued to change, and by the time 20 years had passed, the Dictionary was outdated.

There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement of perhaps one or two volumes; but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for the user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset, with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement.

Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit the second supplement; Onions, who turned 84 that year, was still able to make some contributions as well. Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language, and through the supplement the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield also broadened the scope to include developments of the language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom, including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. The work was expected to take seven to ten years.^{[citation needed]} It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four volumes, starting with A, H, O and Sea. They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement.

By this time it was clear that the full text of the Dictionary would now need to be computerized. Achieving this would require retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching — as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this process began in 1983, and editorial work started the following year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors.

And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project began. More than 120 keyboarders of the International Computaprint Corporation in Tampa, Florida, and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, USA, started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML. A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under a 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, led by Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation. Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM; the colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX, was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM.^[13] The University of Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz, an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in Time as saying "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of a project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline."^[14]

By 1989 the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the Second Edition of the OED, or the OED2, was published. The first edition retronymically became the OED1.

The OED2 was printed in 20 volumes. For the first time, there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with A, B.B.C., Cham, Creel, Dvandva, Follow, Hat, Interval, Look, Moul, Ow, Poise, Quemadero, Rob, Ser, Soot, Su, Thru, Unemancipated, and Wave.

Although the content of the OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. Also, whereas Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, the OED2 adopted the modern International Phonetic Alphabet. Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated.

The British quiz show Countdown has awarded the leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series since its inception in 1982.

When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. The author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century," as quoted by Dan Fisher of the Los Angeles Times (25 March 1989).^{[cite this quote]} TIME dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest,"^[14] and Richard Boston, writing for the London Guardian (24 March 1989), called it "one of the wonders of the world."^{[cite this quote]}

New material was published in the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, which consisted of two small volumes in 1993, and a third in 1997, bringing the dictionary to a total of 23 volumes. Each of the supplements added about 3,000 new definitions. However, no more Additions volumes are planned, and it is not expected that any part of the Third Edition, or OED3, will be printed in fascicles.

Compact editions

In 1971, the 13-volume OED1 (1933) was reprinted as a two-volume, Compact Edition, by photographically reducing each page to one-half its linear dimensions; each compact edition page held four OED1 pages in a four-up ("4-up") format. The two volume letters were A and P; the Supplement was at the second volume's end.

The Compact Edition included, in a small slip-case drawer, a magnifying glass to help in reading reduced type. Many copies were inexpensively distributed through book clubs. In 1987, the second Supplement was published as a third volume to the Compact Edition. In 1991, for the OED2, the compact edition format was re-sized to one-third of original linear dimensions, a nine-up ("9-up") format requiring greater magnification, but allowing publication of a single-volume dictionary. It was accompanied by a magnifying glass as before and A User's Guide to the "Oxford English Dictionary", by Donna Lee Berg. After these volumes were published, though, book club offers commonly continued to sell the two-volume 1971 Compact Edition.

Electronic versions

Once the text of the dictionary was digitized and online, it was also available to be published on CD-ROM. The text of the First Edition was made available in 1988. Afterward, three versions of the second edition were issued. Version 1 (1992) was identical in content to the printed Second Edition, and the CD itself was not copy-protected. Version 2 (1999) had some additions to the corpus, and updated software with improved searching features, but it had clumsy copy-protection that made it difficult to use and would even cause the program to deny use to OUP staff in the midst of demonstrating the product.^{[citation needed]}

Version 3.0 was released in 2002 with additional words and software improvements, though its copy-protection remained as unforgiving as that of the earlier version. Version 3.1.1 (2007) includes a return to the less restrictive nature of version 1, with support for hard disk installation, so that the user does not have to insert the CD to use the dictionary. It has been reported that this version will work on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, using emulation programs.^[15][16] Version 4.0 of the CD, available since June 2009, works with Windows 7 and, for the first time ever, with Mac OS X (10.4 or later).^[17][18] This version will use the CD drive for installation, running only from the hard drive.

On 14 March 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) became available to subscribers.^[19] The online database contains the entire OED2 and is updated quarterly with revisions that will be included in the OED3 (see below). The online edition is the most up-to-date version of the dictionary available. Whilst the OED web site is not optimised for mobile devices, they have stated that there are plans to provide an API which would enable developers to develop different interfaces for querying the OED.^[20]

As the price for an individual to use this edition, even after a reduction in 2004, is £195 or US$295 every year, most subscribers are large organizations such as universities. Some of them do not use the Oxford English Dictionary Online portal and have legally downloaded the entire database into their organization's computers.^{[citation needed]} Some public libraries and companies have subscribed as well, including, in March and April 2006, most public libraries in England, Wales, and New Zealand;^[21][22][23] any person belonging to a library subscribing to the service is able to use the service from their own home.

Another method of payment was introduced in 2004, offering residents of North or South America the opportunity to pay US$29.95 a month to access the online site.

Third Edition

The planned Third Edition, or OED3, is intended as a nearly complete overhaul of the work. Each word is being examined and revised to improve the accuracy of the definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and historical quotations—a task requiring the efforts of a staff consisting of more than 300 scholars, researchers, readers, and consultants, and projected to cost about $55 million. The result is expected to double the overall length of the text. The style of the dictionary will also change slightly. The original text was more literary, in that most of the quotations were taken from novels, plays, and other literary sources. The new edition, however, will reference all manner of printed resources, such as cookbooks, wills, technical manuals, specialist journals, and rock lyrics. The pace of inclusion of new words has been increased to the rate of about 4,000 a year. The estimated date of completion is 2037.^[24][25]

New content can be viewed through the OED Online or on the periodically updated CD-ROM edition.

As of 1993, John Simpson is the Chief Editor. Since the first work by each editor tends to require more revision than his later, more polished work, (work on the first edition was begun at A) it was decided to balance out this effect, by performing the early, and perhaps itself less polished, work of the current revision at a letter other than A. Accordingly, the main work of the OED3 has been proceeding in sequence from the letter M. When the OED Online was launched in March 2000, it included the first batch of revised entries (officially described as draft entries), stretching from M to mahurat, and successive sections of text have since been released on a quarterly basis; by March 2010, the revised section had reached Rg. As new work is done on words in other parts of the alphabet, this is also included in each quarterly release. In March 2008, the editors announced that they would alternate each quarter between moving forward in the alphabet as before and updating "key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them."

The production of the new edition takes full advantage of computers, particularly since the June 2005 inauguration of the whimsically named "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application", or "Pasadena." With this XML-based system, the attention of lexicographers can be directed more to matters of content than to presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. The new system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and enabled staff in New York to work directly on the Dictionary in the same way as their Oxford-based counterparts.^[26]

Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage, and e-mail submissions of quotations by readers and the general public.

Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the general public for help in providing citations for 50 selected recent words, and produced antedatings for many. The results were reported in a BBC TV series, Balderdash and Piffle. The OED’s small army of devoted readers continue to contribute quotations; the department currently receives about 200,000 a year.

Spelling

The OED lists British headword spellings (e.g. labour, centre) with variants following (labor, center, etc.). For the suffix more commonly spelt -ise in British English, OUP policy dictates a preference for the spelling -ize, e.g. realize vs realise and globalization vs globalisation. The rationale is partly linguistic, that the English suffix mainly derives from the Greek suffix -ιζειν, (-izo), or the Latin -izāre; however, -ze is also an Americanism in the fact that the -ze suffix has crept into words where it did not originally belong, as with analyse (British English), which is spelt analyze in American English.^[27] See also -ise/-ize at American and British English spelling differences.

The sentence "The group analysed labour statistics published by the organization" is an example of OUP practice. This spelling (indicated with the registered IANA language tag en-GB-oed) is used by the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Organization for Standardization, and many British academic publications, such as Nature, the Biochemical Journal, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Criticisms

Despite its claim of authority^{[citation needed]} on the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary has been criticised from various angles. Indeed, it has become a target precisely because of its massiveness, its claims to authority, and, above all, its influence. In his review of the 1982 supplement, University of Oxford linguist Roy Harris writes that criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution", one that "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle".^[28] Harris also criticises what he sees as the "black-and-white lexicography" of the Dictionary, by which he means its reliance upon printed language over spoken—and then only privileged forms of printing. He further notes that, while neologisms from respected "literary" authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf are included, usage of words in newspapers or other, less "respectable", sources hold less sway, although they may be commonly used.^[28]

In contrast, Tim Bray, co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the developing inspiration of that markup language. Similarly, the author Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org, has called the Oxford English Dictionary a "lex icon." ^[29]

See also

• Canadian Oxford Dictionary
• Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English
• Concise Oxford English Dictionary
• New Oxford American Dictionary
• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• Oxford Dictionary of English
• Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Notes

1. ^ OED2 from Amazon.com
2. ^ Oxford University Press
3. ^ OED reaches its quarter mark from the official OED website
4. ^ OED Facts
5. ^ http://www.oed.com/news/updates/revisions0712.html
6. ^ Winchester, Simon (1999). The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperPernnial. pp. 103–104, 112. ISBN 0-06-083978-3.
7. ^ Winchester, Simon (1999). The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperPernnial. pp. 107–108. ISBN 0-06-083978-3.
8. ^ Winchester, Simon (1999). The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperPernnial. pp. 110. ISBN 0-06-083978-3.
9. ^ Winchester, Simon (1999). The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperPernnial. pp. 111–112. ISBN 0-06-083978-3.
10. ^ Winchester, Simon (1999). The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperPernnial. p. xiii. ISBN 0-06-083978-3.
11. ^ Winchester, Simon (1999). The Professor and the Madman. New York: HarperPernnial. ISBN 0-06-083978-3.
12. ^ OED Contributors: Tolkien
13. ^ LEXX – A programmable structured editor, Cowlishaw, M. F., IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol 31, No. 1, 1987, IBM Reprint order number G322-0151
14. ^ ^{a b} Paul Gray, "A Scholarly Everest Gets Bigger," Time, 27 March 1989.
15. ^ R.J.Holmgren, "v3.x under Mac OS X and Linux", last revised 22 March 2008. Accessed 19 April 2008
16. ^ "Bernie" from ELearnAid.com, "Oxford English Dictionary News", 6 May 2004. Accessed 19 April 2008
17. ^ "Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Version 4.0 (Windows & Mac)". http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-English-Dictionary-Version-Windows/dp/0199563837/.
18. ^ "Mac Compatibility". http://www.oup.co.uk/ep/cdroms/oed/oed2v3_11/#4.
19. ^ Juliet New (22 March 2000). "'The world's greatest dictionary' goes online". Ariadne (23). ISSN 1361-3200. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-online/. Retrieved 2007-03-18. ,
20. ^ "Looking Forward to an Oxford English Dictionary API". http://blog.webometrics.org.uk/2009/08/looking-forward-to-oxford-english.html.
21. ^ "Oxford Online in English Public Libraries". http://www.oup.com/online/englishpubliclibraries/.
22. ^ "New Zealand procurement". http://epic.org.nz/nl/Procurement.html.
23. ^ "OED on-line New Zealand". http://epic.org.nz/nl/oup.html#oed.
24. ^ Stephanie Willen Brown, From Unregistered Words to OED3, CogSci Librarian, 23 August 2007. Accessed 23 October 2007.
25. ^ Simon Winchester. History of the Oxford English Dictionary TVOntario Big Ideas. (2007-05-27). Podcast accessed on 2007-12-01.
26. ^ Liz Thompson (December 2005). "Pasadena: A Brand New System for the OED" (PDF). Oxford English Dictionary News (Oxford University Press): p. 4. http://oed.com/pdfs/oed-news-2005-12.pdf. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
27. ^ http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/ize?view=get
28. ^ ^{a b} Harris 1982, p.935.
29. ^ Globe & Mail

References

• Creaser, Wanda. Review of Willinsky, John, Empire of Words: The Reign of the Oxford English Dictionary. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 50:1 (1996): 108–109. JSTOR. 7 April 2008. [1]
• Harris, Roy (1982-09-03). "The History Men". Times Literary Supplement: 935–936.
• Gleick, James (2006-11-05). "Cyber-Neologoliferation". The New York Times Magazine.

Further reading

• Caught in the Web of Words: J. A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, by K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Oxford University Press and Yale University Press, 1977; new edition 2001, Yale University Press, trade paperback, ISBN 0-300-08919-8.
• Empire of Words: The Reign of the Oxford English Dictionary, by John Willinsky, Princeton University Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 0-691-03719-1.
• The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, Oxford University Press, 2003, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-860702-4.
• (UK title) The Surgeon of Crowthorne / (US title) The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester; see The Surgeon of Crowthorne for full details of the various editions.
• Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Lynda Mugglestone, Yale University Press, 2005, hardcover, ISBN 0-300-10699-8.
• The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, Oxford University Press, 2006, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-861069-6.
• Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED, Charlotte Brewer, Yale University Press, 2007, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-300-12429-3.
• Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, by Jonathon Green, Jonathan Cape, 1996, hardcover, ISBN 0-224-04010-3.

External links

• The Oxford English Dictionary's official website
  • Archive of documents (as page images), including
    • Trench's original "Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries" paper
    • Murray's original appeal for readers
  • Their page of OED statistics, and another such page.
  • Two sample pagesPDF (1.54 MiB) from the OED.
• Examining the OED: Charlotte Brewer's analysis of the principles and practices used by OED editors
  • Bibliography of "[c]ritical assessments of OED or accounts of its history", from Examining the OED
• The OED Meets Cyberspace: James Gleick's 2006 article.
• The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (OED-1). Volume Index or all volumes at Internet Archive
• Simon Winchester. History of the Oxford English Dictionary TVOntario Big Ideas. (2007-05-27). Podcast accessed on 2007-12-01.

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