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By the time the new supplement was completed, 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.[25] Editing an entry of the NOED using LEXX 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.[25] 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.[25] 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.[26] 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.[27] 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."[28] 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.[29] 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.[29][30] Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated.[29] The British quiz show Countdown has awarded the leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series since its inception in 1982.[31] 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 the Los Angeles Times.[32] Time dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest",[28] and Richard Boston, writing for The Guardian, called it "one of the wonders of the world".[33] Additions series While the supplements, and their integration into the second edition, were a great improvement to the OED as a whole, it was recognized that most of the entries were still fundamentally unaltered from the first edition. Much of the information in the dictionary published in 1989 was already decades out of date: though the supplements had made good progress towards incorporating new vocabulary, many definitions contained outdated scientific theories, historical information, and moral values.[34][35] Furthermore, the supplements had failed to recognize many words in the existing volumes as obsolete by the time of the second edition's publication, meaning thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use.[36] Accordingly, it was immediately recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin immediately to rectify these problems.[34] The first attempt to produce a new edition came with the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, a new set of supplements to complement the OED2 with the intention of producing a third edition from them.[37] Unlike the previous supplements, which appeared in alphabetical installments, the new series had a full A–Z range of entries within each individual volume, with a complete alphabetical index at the end of all words revised so far, each listed with the volume number which contained the revised entry.[37] However, in the end only three Additions volumes were published this way, two in 1993 and one in 1997,[38][39][40] each containing about 3,000 new definitions.[3] The possibilities of the World Wide Web and new computer technology in general meant that the processes of researching the dictionary and of publishing new and revised entries could be vastly improved. New text search databases offered vastly more material for the editors of the dictionary to work with, and with publication on the Web as a possibility, the editors could publish revised entries much more quickly and easily than ever before.[41] A new approach was called for, and for this reason it was decided to embark on a new, complete revision of the dictionary. Third edition Beginning with the launch of the first OED Online site in 2000, the editors of the dictionary began a major revision project to create a completely revised third edition of the dictionary (OED3), expected to be completed in 2037[42][43] at a projected cost of about £34 million.[44] Revisions were started at the letter M, with new material appearing every three months on the OED Online website. The editors chose to start the revision project from the middle of the dictionary in order that the overall quality of entries be made more even, since the later entries in the OED1 generally tended to be better than the earlier ones. However, 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".[45] With the relaunch of the OED Online website in December 2010, alphabetical revision was abandoned altogether.[46] The revision is expected to roughly double the dictionary in size.[2][47] Apart from general updates to include information on new words and other changes in the language, the third edition brings many other improvements, including changes in formatting and stylistic conventions to make entries clearer to read and enable more thorough searches to be made by computer, more thorough etymological information, and a general change of focus away from individual words towards more general coverage of the language as a whole.[41][48] While the original text drew its quotations mainly from literary sources such as novels, plays, and poetry, with additional material from newspapers and academic journals, the new edition will reference more kinds of material that were unavailable to the editors of previous editions, such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters.[47] John Simpson was the first chief editor of the OED3. He retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt, who is the eighth chief editor of the dictionary.[49] The production of the new edition takes full advantage of computer technology, 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.[50] Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage, and e-mail submissions of quotations by readers and the general public.[51] 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.[52] Formats 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 first 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.[53] After these volumes were published, though, book club offers commonly continued to sell the two-volume 1971 Compact Edition.[19] Electronic versions A screenshot of the first version of the OED second edition CD-ROM software. 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 1987.[54] 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) included the OED Additions of 1993 and 1997. Version 3.0 was released in 2002 with additional words from the OED3 and software improvements. Version 3.1.1 (2007) added 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.[55][56] Version 4.0 of the CD, available since June 2009, works with Windows 7 and Mac OS X (10.4 or later).[57] 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.[58] 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, the developers have stated that there are plans to provide an API that would enable developers to develop different interfaces for querying the OED.[59] OED2 4th Edition CD-ROM 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 public libraries and companies have subscribed as well, including public libraries in England, Wales, and New Zealand;[60][61] any person belonging to a library subscribing to the service is able to use the service from their own home without charge. Relationship to other Oxford dictionaries The OED's utility and renown as a historical dictionary have led to numerous offspring projects and other dictionaries bearing the Oxford name, though not all are directly related to the OED itself. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, originally started in 1902 and completed in 1933,[62] is an abridgement of the full work that retains the historical focus, but does not include any words which were obsolete before 1700 except those used by Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and the King James Bible. A completely new edition was produced from the OED2 and published in 1993,[63] with further revisions following in 2002 and 2007. The Concise Oxford Dictionary is a different work, which aims to cover current English only, without the historical focus. The original edition, mostly based on the OED1, was edited by Francis George Fowler and Henry Watson Fowler and published in 1911, before the main work was completed.[64] Revised editions appeared throughout the twentieth century to keep it up to date with changes in English usage. However, in 1998 the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) was published. While also aiming to cover current English, NODE is not based on the OED. Instead, it is an entirely new dictionary produced with the aid of corpus linguistics. Once NODE was published, a similarly brand-new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary followed, this time based on an abridgement of NODE rather than the OED; NODE (under the new title of the Oxford Dictionary of English, or ODE) continues to be principal source for Oxford's product line of current-English dictionaries, with the OED now only serving as the basis for scholarly historical dictionaries. Spelling Main article: Oxford 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 etymological, in that the English suffix mainly derives from the Greek suffix -ιζειν, (-izein), or the Latin -izāre.[65] However -ze is also sometimes treated as an Americanism insofar as 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.[66][67] Criticisms Despite its claim of authority[68] on the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary has been criticised from various angles. 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,[69] University of Oxford linguist Roy Harris writes that criticising 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". 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. He writes that the OED's "[b]lack-and-white lexicography is also black-and-white in that it takes upon itself to pronounce authoritatively on the rights and wrongs of usage", faulting the dictionary's prescriptive, rather than descriptive, usage. To Harris, this prescriptive classification of certain usages as "erroneous" and the complete omission of various forms and usages cumulatively represent the "social bias[es]" of the (presumably well-educated and wealthy) compilers. However, the identification of "erroneous and catachrestic" usages is being removed from third edition entries,[70][71] sometimes in favour of usage notes describing the attitudes to language which have previously led to these classifications.[72] Harris also faults the editors' "donnish conservatism" and their adherence to prudish Victorian morals, citing as an example the non-inclusion of "various centuries-old 'four-letter words'" until 1972. However, no English dictionary included such words, for fear of possible prosecution under British obscenity laws, until after the conclusion of the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial in 1960. The first dictionary to include them was the Penguin English Dictionary of 1965.[73] Founding editor James Murray was also reluctant to include scientific terms, despite their documentation, unless he felt they were widely enough used. In 1902 he declined to add the word "radium" to the dictionary.[74][75] In contrast, Tim Bray, co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the developing inspiration of that markup language.[76] Similarly, the author Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org, has called the Oxford English Dictionary a "lex icon".[77] |
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