Origins The dictionary began as a
Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to
Oxford University):
Richard Chenevix Trench,
Herbert Coleridge, and
Frederick Furnivall, who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries. The society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844, but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined 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 • Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations • Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content. The society 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, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to a larger 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. , 1825–1910 On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published and research was started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54 pigeon-hole grid. In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both
Henry Sweet and
Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached
James Murray, 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. Murray had American philologist and
liberal arts college professor
Francis March manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium and, by 1880, there were 2,500,000. The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work unless editorial arrangements were revised. Accordingly, new assistants were hired, and two new demands were made on Murray. In 1919–1920,
J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the
OED, researching etymologies of the
Waggle to
Warlock range; later he parodied the principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story
Farmer Giles of Ham. 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.
William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed dictionary, with
Hamlet his most-quoted work.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is the most-quoted female writer. Collectively, the
Bible is the most-quoted work (in many translations); the most-quoted single work is
Cursor Mundi. Additional material for a given letter range continued to be gathered after the corresponding fascicle was printed, with a view towards inclusion in a supplement or revised edition. A one-volume supplement of such material was published in 1933, with entries weighted towards the start of the alphabet where the fascicles were decades old. many words and senses newly coined (famously
appendicitis, coined in 1886 and missing from the 1885 fascicle, which came to prominence when
Edward VII's 1902 appendicitis postponed
his coronation); and some previously excluded as too obscure (notoriously
radium, omitted in 1903, months before its discoverers
Pierre and
Marie Curie won the
Nobel Prize in Physics). Also in 1933 the original fascicles of the entire dictionary were re-issued, bound into 12 volumes, under the title "
The Oxford English Dictionary". This edition of 13 volumes including the supplement was subsequently reprinted in 1961 and 1970.
Second supplement 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 20 years later, the dictionary was outdated.
Charles Talbut Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. 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. 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 said that he 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. Burchfield also removed, for unknown reasons, many entries that had been added to the 1933 supplement. In 2012, an analysis by lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie revealed that many of these entries were foreign
loan words, despite Burchfield's claim that he included more such words. The proportion was estimated from a sample calculation to amount to 17% of the foreign loan words and words from regional forms of English. Some of these had only a single recorded usage, but many had multiple recorded citations, and it ran against what was thought to be the established
OED editorial practice and a perception that he had opened up the dictionary to "World English".
Second edition As work on the supplement neared completion, the management of Oxford University Press began to consider the future of the
OED. The copyright of the 1933 first edition of the dictionary was due to come to an end in 1983. There was also a desire to retain, for the benefit of the future development of Oxford dictionaries, the skilled team of lexicographers employed by the Press. Crucially, there was a widely recognized need to revise the dictionary. As a solution to these issues, integration of the first edition and the supplement into one dictionary (which could then be revised) became a priority, though how this should be achieved was uncertain.
Richard Charkin, Head of Reference at the OUP, argued in favour of computerizing the two texts, and subsequently combining and editing them electronically. Burchfield commissioned research into the activities and resources that would be required to revise and update the
OED using computer technology, which concluded that the conversion and integration of the texts was feasible. In order to find the expertise necessary for the project, in June 1983 a
request for tender was submitted by the OUP to various computer companies, software houses, government agencies, and academic departments. Many responses were received; Charkin and
OED editor
Edmund Weiner made numerous visits in the UK and North America. It was determined that no single agency could carry out the whole task, and that the OUP would have to take on the central managing role. For this purpose a department, known as the New OED Project, was set up under Tim Benbow, with Weiner and
John Simpson as co-editors of the new dictionary. The project was divided into two phases: • Merging the first edition and the supplement. • Full revision and updating of the
OED. After the first phase, the integrated edition was to be published on paper – and subsequently in electronic form – as the second edition of the
OED. The second phase, a proper revision of the dictionary that would create a third edition, was deferred to a later stage. As partners assisting in the project, the International Computaprint Corporation (now
Reed Tech) was chosen to carry out the conversion of the text into electronic form;
IBM UK were to supply software and hardware and assist with the building of a computer system for integrating the texts; and the
University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada agreed to work on designing a database system for updating and disseminating the OED after integration. The university set up the
Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, led by
Frank Tompa and
Gaston Gonnet; this project went on to become the basis for the
Open Text Corporation.
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." Electronic conversion of the text was done by
keyboarding.
Optical character recognition was not practical due to the poor quality of the printed text of the first edition.
Mark-up was then introduced into the text: ICC typists entered a system of tags into the text that included major structural tags (such as headword, pronunciation, etymology, sense section, quotation etc.) as well as
typographic tags. This mark-up would add to the dictionary "a whole new world of information". According to Weiner: The aim from the start, then, was to transform the text into an electronic database, in which every part of the text had its own identifying tag; these tags would form the basis both for complex text searching and for versatile text representation. 18 monthly batches of
proofs were returned to Oxford between 1985 and 1986, and checked by over 50 proof-readers. In all, 350 million characters were keyed, taking 120
person-years; proof-reading took a total of 60 person-years. The dictionary text was treated as a
language with a rule-governed
syntax, and a
grammar of the text was written at Oxford. The text was parsed by a
parser developed by the research group at the University of Waterloo. The tagging system was automatically converted to adopt
SGML conventions. The integration of the two texts was largely automated; complete entries from the supplement were easily slotted into place in the integrated text. In order to integrate partial entries, a software component was built that used the mark-up to match corresponding pieces of text by headword, part of speech, homonym number and sense number. This process was facilitated by instructions already present in the printed text of the supplement, such as "add to def.:", followed by supplementary definition text. Automatic integration was completed in May 1987; it successfully handled about 80 per cent of the text, saving 50–60 per cent of manual editorial and keyboarding work. Since programs to edit large textual databases had not been developed, a program named
LEXX was developed for the project by IBM scientist
Mike Cowlishaw, and renamed OEDIPUS ("OED Integration, Publishing, and Updating System"). The target addresses of many cross-references would be invalidated by the integration, for example due to updated sense numbers. Cross-references were therefore identified by the parser and numbered; after integration, they were checked against their targets and adjusted where appropriate. The
headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, whereas the
OED2 adopted the modern
International Phonetic Alphabet. Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were
transliterated. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the
OED2 was published on paper in 20 volumes in March 1989, 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations, making a total of 616,500 word-forms. There are 137,000
pronunciations, 249,300
etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and 2,412,400 usage
quotations. According to the publishers, the text required 540
megabytes of electronic storage. When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. Author
Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century", as quoted by the
Los Angeles Times.
Time dubbed the book "a scholarly
Everest",
Additions series The supplements and their integration into the second edition were a great improvement to the
OED as a whole, but 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. Yet many definitions contained disproven scientific theories, outdated historical information, and moral values that were no longer widely accepted. 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 previous supplements appeared in alphabetical instalments, 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. each containing about 3,000 new definitions. A new approach was called for, and for this reason it was decided to embark on a new, complete revision of the dictionary. •
Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series Volume 1 (): 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 () :*?th impression (1994-02-10) •
Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series Volume 3 (): 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 at a projected cost of circa
£34 million. 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. The production of the new edition exploits computer technology, particularly since the inauguration in June 2005 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
OEDs readers contribute quotations: the department currently receives about 200,000 a year.
OED currently contains over 500,000 entries. The online
OED is updated on a quarterly basis, with the addition of new words and senses, and the revision of existing entries. == Formats ==