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The Oxford English Dictionary

Seven of the twenty volumes of printed second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989)
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Published	1884–1928 (first edition) 1989 (second edition) Third edition in preparation
Website	https://www.oed.com/

ttistorical Principles (NED).ed. 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 that thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use.

Accordingly, it was recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin to rectify these problems. 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. The previous supplements appeared in alphabetical installments, whereas 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.

• Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series Volume 1 (ISBN 978-0-19-861292-6): Includes over 20,000 illustrative quotations showing the evolution of each word or meaning.

• ?th impression (1994-02-10)

• Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series Volume 2 (ISBN 978-0-19-861299-5)

• ?th impression (1994-02-10)

• Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series Volume 3 (ISBN 978-0-19-860027-5): Contains 3,000 new words and meanings from around the English-speaking world. Published by Clarendon Press.

• ?th impression (1997-10-09)

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 with the projected cost of about £34 million.

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". With the relaunch of the OED Online website in December 2010, alphabetical revision was abandoned altogether.

The revision is expected roughly to double the dictionary in size. 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 for easier reading and computerized searching, more etymological information, and a general change of focus away from individual words towards more general coverage of the language as a whole. 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.

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.

The production of the new edition exploits computer technology, particularly since the June 2005 inauguration of the "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application", or "Pasadena". With this XML-based system, lexicographers can spend less effort on presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. This 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.

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

New entries and words

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 readers contribute quotations: the department currently receives about 200,000 a year.

OED currently contains over 600,000 entries.They update the OED on a quarterly basis to make up for its Third Edition revising their existing entries and adding new words and senses.

More than 600 new words, senses, and subentries have been added to the OED in December 2018, including "to drain the swamp", "TGIF", and "burkini". South African additions—like eina, dwaal, and amakhosi—were also included. The phrase "taffety tarts" entered the OED for the first time.

Did you guys know im vegan

yeah yeah

so guys i just tested positive for covid 19 no no which means i cant do my public singing challenges anymore

• ?th impression (1991-12-05)

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 1987. 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 Oxford English Dictionary 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. Version 4.0 of the CD has been available since June 2009 and works with Windows 7 and Mac OS X (10.4 or later). This version uses 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. The online database contains the entire OED2 and is updated quarterly with revisions that will be included in the OED3 (see above). The online edition is the most up-to-date version of the dictionary available. The OED web site is not optimized for mobile devices, but the developers have stated that there are plans to provide an API that would enable developers to develop different interfaces for querying the OED.

The price for an individual to use this edition is £195 or US$295 every year, even after a reduction in 2004; consequently, most subscribers are large organizations such as universities. Some public libraries and companies have subscribed, as well, including public libraries in the United Kingdom, where access is funded by the Arts Council, and public libraries in New Zealand. Individuals who belong to a library which subscribes to the service are able to use the service from their own home without charge.

• Oxford English Dictionary Second edition on CD-ROM Version 3.1:

• Upgrade version for 3.0 (ISBN 978-0-19-522216-6):

• ?th impression (2005-08-18)

• Oxford English Dictionary Second edition on CD-ROM Version 4.0: Includes 500,000 words with 2.5 million source quotations, 7,000 new words and meanings. Includes Vocabulary from OED 2nd Edition and all 3 Additions volumes. Supports Windows 2000-7 and Mac OS X 10.4–10.5). Flash-based dictionary.

• Full version (ISBN 0-19-956383-7/ISBN 978-0-19-956383-8)

• ?th impression (2009-06-04)

• Upgrade version for 2.0 and above (ISBN 0-19-956594-5/ISBN 978-0-19-956594-8): Supports Windows only.

• ?th impression (2009-07-15)

• Print+CD-ROM version (ISBN 978-0-19-957315-8): Supports Windows Vista and Mac OS).

• ?th impression (2009-11-16)

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, 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, with revisions 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. Revised editions appeared throughout the twentieth century to keep it up to date with changes in English usage.

The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English was originally conceived by F. G. Fowler and H. W. Fowler to be compressed, compact, and concise. Its primary source is the Oxford English Dictionary, and it is nominally an abridgment of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It was first published in 1924.

In 1998 the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) was published. While also aiming to cover current English, NODE was not based on the OED. Instead, it was 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, including the New Oxford American Dictionary, with the OED now only serving as the basis for scholarly historical dictionaries.

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 is mainly derived from the Greek suffix -ιζειν, (-izein), or the Latin -izāre. 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.

Reception

British prime minister Stanley Baldwin described the OED as a "national treasure". Author Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org, has called it a "lex icon". Tim Bray, co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the developing inspiration of that markup language.

However, despite, and at the same time precisely because of, its claims of authority, the dictionary has been criticized since at least the 1960s from various angles. It has become a target precisely because of its scope, its claims to authority, its British-centredness and relative neglect of World Englishes, its implied but not acknowledged focus on literary language and, above all, its influence. The OED, as a commercial product, has always had to manoeuvre a thin line between PR, marketing and scholarship and one can argue that its biggest problem is the critical uptake of the work by the interested public. 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". He further notes that neologisms from respected "literary" authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf are included, whereas usage of words in newspapers or other less "respectable" sources hold less sway, even though they may be commonly used. He writes that the OED's "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" of the (presumably well-educated and wealthy) compilers. However, the identification of "erroneous and catachrestic" usages is being removed from third edition entries, sometimes in favour of usage notes describing the attitudes to language which have previously led to these classifications.

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 the word fuck was the Penguin English Dictionary of 1965. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary had included shit in 1905.

The OED's claims of authority have also been questioned by linguists such as Pius ten Hacken, who notes that the dictionary actively strives towards definitiveness and authority but can only achieve those goals in a limited sense, given the difficulties of defining the scope of what it includes.

Founding editor James Murray was also reluctant to include scientific terms, despite their documentation, unless he felt that they were widely enough used. In 1902, he declined to add the word "radium" to the dictionary.

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
• Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
• A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles
• The Australian National Dictionary
• Dictionary of American Regional English

References

1. ^ Andrew Dickson, "Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?", The Guardian, 23 February 2018 (page visited on 23 February 2018).
2. Craigie, W. A.; Onions, C. T. (1933). A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Introduction, Supplement, and Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
3. ^ "Preface to the Second Edition: The history of the Oxford English Dictionary: The New Oxford English Dictionary project". Oxford English Dictionary Online. 1989. Archived from the original on 16 December 2003. Retrieved 16 December 2003.
4. Brewer, Charlotte (28 December 2011). "Which edition contains what?". Examining the OED. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
5. Brewer, Charlotte (28 December 2011). "Review of OED3". Examining the OED. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
6. ^ "Preface to the Additions Series (vol. 1): Introduction". Oxford English Dictionary Online. 1993. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008. Retrieved 16 May 2008.
7. Rachman, Tom (27 January 2014). "Deadline 2037: The Making of the Next Oxford English Dictionary". The Irish Times. Retrieved 27 August 2019.
8. Willen Brown, Stephanie (26 August 2007). "From Unregistered Words to OED3". CogSci Librarian. Retrieved 23 October 2007 – via BlogSpot.
9. Winchester, Simon (27 May 2007). "History of the Oxford English Dictionary". TVOntario (Podcast). Big Ideas. Archived from the original (MP3) on 16 February 2008. Retrieved 1 December 2007.
10. "History of the OED". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
11. "March 2008 Update". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
12. Brewer, Charlotte (12 February 2012). "OED Online and OED3". Examining the OED. Hertford College, University of Oxford. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
13. Flanagan, Padraic (20 April 2014). "RIP for OED as world's finest dictionary goes out of print". The Telegraph. Retrieved 8 June 2014.
14. ^ Simpson, John (March 2000). "Preface to the Third Edition of the OED". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
15. Simpson, John (31 January 2011). "The Making of the OED, 3rd ed" (video). Retrieved 7 June 2014.
16. Durkin, Philip N. R. (1999). "Root and Branch: Revising the Etymological Component of the Oxford English Dictionary". Transactions of the Philological Society. 97 (1): 1–49. doi:10.1111/1467-968X.00044.
17. "John Simpson, Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to Retire". Oxford English Dictionary Online. 23 April 2013. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
18. Thompson, Liz (December 2005). "Pasadena: A Brand New System for the OED". Oxford English Dictionary News. Oxford University Press. p. 4. Retrieved 6 January 2014.
19. "Collecting the Evidence". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 8 June 2014.
20. "Reading Programme". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 8 June 2014.
21. "About". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 9 June 2020.
22. "Updates to the OED". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 27 October 2018.
23. "December 2018 Update: To drain the swamp, with one's bum in the butter". Oxford English Dictionary Online. 13 December 2018. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
24. "South African additions to the OED". Oxford English Dictionary Online. 13 December 2018. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
25. "December 2018 update: Taffety tarts enter the OED". Oxford English Dictionary Online. 13 December 2018. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
26. Logan, H. M. (1989). "Report on a New OED Project: A Study of the History of New Words in the New OED". Computers and the Humanities. 23 (4–5): 385–395. doi:10.1007/BF02176644. JSTOR 30204378.
27. Holmgren, R. J. (21 December 2013). "v3.x under Macintosh OSX and Linux". Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on CD-ROM in a 16-, 32-, or 64-bit Windows environment. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
28. Bernie. "Oxford English Dictionary News". Newsgroup: alt.english.usage. Usenet: 07ymc.5870$pa7.1359@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
29. "The Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM Version 4.0 Windows/Mac Individual User Version". Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 29 June 2009. Retrieved 26 December 2013.
30. New, Juliet (23 March 2000). "'The world's greatest dictionary' goes online". Ariadne. ISSN 1361-3200. Retrieved 18 March 2007.
31. "Looking Forward to an Oxford English Dictionary API". Webometric Thoughts. 21 August 2009. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
32. Kite, Lorien (15 November 2013). "The evolving role of the Oxford English Dictionary". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. Retrieved 22 June 2015.
33. "How do I know if my public library subscribes?". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 6 January 2013.
34. "Oxford University Press Databases available through EPIC". EPIC. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
35. Current OED Version 4.0
36. Burnett, Lesley S. (1986). "Making it short: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary" (PDF). ZuriLEX '86 Proceedings: 229–233. Retrieved 7 June 2014.
37. Blake, G. Elizabeth; Bray, Tim; Tompa, Frank Wm (1992). "Shortening the OED: Experience with a Grammar-Defined Database". ACM Transactions on Information Systems. 10 (3): 213–232. doi:10.1145/146760.146764.
38. Brown, Lesley, ed. (1993). The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-861134-9.
39. The Concise Oxford Dictionary: The Classic First Edition. Oxford University Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-969612-3, facsimile reprint.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
40. Thompson, Della. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 8th Edition. Oxford University Press. 1996. ISBN 978-0198600459.
41. Quinion, Michael (18 September 2010). "Review: Oxford Dictionary of English". World Wide Words. Retrieved 29 July 2014.
42. "-ize, suffix". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
43. "Verbs ending in -ize, -ise, -yze, and -yse : Oxford Dictionaries Online". Askoxford.com. Retrieved 3 August 2010.
44. See also -ise/-ize at American and British English spelling differences.
45. "Well-chosen words". Financial Times. Retrieved 3 June 2018.
46. "Globe & Mail". Wordsmith. 11 February 2002. Retrieved 3 August 2010.
47. Bray, Tim (9 April 2003). "On Semantics and Markup". ongoing by Tim Bray. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
48. "History of the OED". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
49. Luk, Vivian (13 August 2013). "UBC prof lobbies Oxford English dictionary to be less British". Toronto Star. Canadian Press. Retrieved 9 February 2016.
50. Harris, Roy (1982). "Review of RW Burchfield A Supplement to the OED Volume 3: O–Scz". TLS. 3: 935–6.
51. Oxford University Press (2017). "Key to symbols and other conventional entries". Oxford English Dictionary online. Retrieved 28 October 2017.
52. "literally, adv. (sense I. 1. c.)". Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2011. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
53. "fuck, v.". Oxford English Dictionary Online. March 2008. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
54. Wright, Joseph (1 February 1898). "The English dialect dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years;". London  : H. Frowde; New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons – via Internet Archive.
55. ten Hacken, Pius (2012). "In what sense is the OED the definitive record of the English language?" (PDF). Proceedings of the 15th EURALEX International Congress: 834–845. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
56. Gross, John, The Oxford Book of Parodies, Oxford University Press, 2010, pg. 319

Further reading

• Brewer, Charlotte (8 October 2019). "Oxford English Dictionary Research". Examining the OED. ] sets out to investigate the principles and practice behind the Oxford English Dictionary...
• Brewer, Charlotte (2007), Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED (hardcover), Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-12429-3
• Dickson, Andrew (23 February 2018). "Inside the OED: can the world's biggest dictionary survive the internet?". the Guardian.
• Gilliver, Peter (2016), The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-199-28362-0
• Gilliver, Peter; Marshall, Jeremy; Weiner, Edmund (2006), The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-861069-4
• Gleick, James (5 November 2006). "Cyber-Neologoliferation". James Gleick. First published in the New York Times Magazine 5 November 2006
• Green, Jonathon; Cape, Jonathan (1996), Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-224-04010-5
• Kelsey-Sugg, Anna (9 April 2020). "In a backyard 'scriptorium', this man set about defining every word in the English language". ABC News (Radio National). Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
• Kite, Lorien (15 November 2013), "The evolving role of the Oxford English Dictionary", Financial Times (online edition)
• McPherson, Fiona (2013). The Oxford English Dictionary: From Victorian venture to the digital age endeavour (mp4). (McPherson is Senior Editor of OED)
• Ogilvie, Sarah (2013), Words of the World: a global history of the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1107605695
• Willinsky, John (1995), Empire of Words: The Reign of the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-03719-6
• Winchester, Simon (27 May 2007). "History of the Oxford English Dictionary". TVOntario (Podcast). Big Ideas. Archived from the original (podcast) on 16 February 2008.
• Winchester, Simon (2003), The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (hardcover), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-860702-1
• Winchester, Simon (1998), "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary", Bulletin of the World Health Organization (hardcover), 79 (6), Harper Collins: 579, ISBN 978-0-06-017596-2, PMC 2566457

External links

• Official website
  • Archive of documents, including
    • Trench's original "On some deficiencies in our English Dictionaries" paper
    • Murray's original appeal for readers
  • Their page of OED statistics, and another such page.
  • Two "sample pages" (PDF). (1.54 MB) from the OED.
• Oxford University Press pages: Second Edition, Additions Series Volume 1, Additions Series Volume 2, Additions Series Volume 3, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary New Edition, 20-volume printed set+CD-ROM, CD 3.1 upgrade, CD 4.0 full, CD 4.0 upgrade

1st edition

Internet Archive

1888–1933 Issue

Full title of each volume: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society

Vol.	Year	Letters	Links
1	1888	A, B	Vol. 1
2	1893	C	Vol. 2
3	1897	D, E	Vol. 3 (version 2)
4	1901	F, G	Vol. 4 (version 2) (version 3)
5	1901	H–K	Vol. 5
6p1	1908	L	Vol. 6, part 1
6p2	1908	M, N	Vol. 6, part 2
7	1909	O, P	Vol.7
8p1	1914	Q, R	Vol. 8, part 1
8p2	1914	S–Sh	Vol.8, part 2
9p1	1919	Si–St	Vol. 9, part 1
9p2	1919	Su–Th	Vol. 9, part 2
10p1	1926	Ti–U	Vol. 10, part 1
10p2	1928	V–Z	Vol. 10, part 2
Sup.	1933	A–Z	Supplement

1933 Corrected re-issue

Full title of each volume: The Oxford English Dictionary: Being a Corrected Re-issue with an Introduction, Supplement and Bibliography, of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society

Vol.	Letters	Links
1	A–B
2	C
3	D–E
4	F–G
5	H–K
6	L–M
7	N–Poy
8	Poy–Ry
9	S–Soldo
10	Sole–Sz
11	T–U
12	V–Z
Sup.	A–Z

HathiTrust

• Some volumes (only available from within the USA):
  • University of Virginia copy
  • Princeton University copy
  • University of Michigan copy

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