Dictionary of Record

Alas, because language is in a constant state of flux, a lexicographer’s work is never done. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with 414,825 words, was completed in 1928, and ceremonial presentations were made to President Calvin Coolidge and King George V. Supplements ensued, but not until 1989 did a second edition appear. According to The Oxford Companion ...
Dictionary of Record

Alas, because language is in a constant state of flux, a lexicographer’s work is never done. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with 414,825 words, was completed in 1928, and ceremonial presentations were made to President Calvin Coolidge and King George V. Supplements ensued, but not until 1989 did a second edition appear. According to The Oxford Companion to the English Language, this edition has “21,728 pages and contains some 290,500 main entries ...”

The pace of change is ever quickening. In March 2000, the 20-volume
OED, plus three volumes of additions, became available online, and every word in the OED is constantly being revised. So, 120 years after the first editor of the OED, James Murray, launched an “appeal for Words for the OED,” John Simpson, the present chief editor, invited “readers to contribute to the development of the Dictionary by adding to our record of English throughout the world. Everyone can play a part in recording the history of the language and in helping to enhance the OED.” I believe this project represents one of the greatest feats of scholarship ever undertaken and accomplishes for lexicography what the Human Genome Project is doing for biology.

Words, and new senses of existing words, are flooding into the language from all corners of the world. Only a dictionary the size of the
OED can adequately capture the true richness of the English language throughout its history. By the time the revisions are completed, sometime between 2025 and 2030, the English vocabulary will most likely have at least doubled. As a result, there may not even be a print edition, since it would require close to 50 volumes. One reason so many words are being added is because of the lexicographic advancements in the non-British and non-American Englishes, such as African and Asian varieties, whose words are increasingly being recorded in the OED. There is no longer only one English language; rather, English is now available in a variety of flavours.

Interestingly, the revision in 2000 began not with the letter “A” but with the letter “M.” I asked John Simpson why this was done, and he replied that “the
OED editors wanted to start the revision at a point halfway through the dictionary where the style was largely consistent, and to return to the earlier, less consistent areas later.” In any case, by 2010 all words from M to R had been revised and since then this alphabetical format has been abandoned and every three months we now find revised entries across the alphabet. For example, in December 2014 “un-PC” was added; June 2014 introduced “branzino,” a term for the European bass or seabass and also the verb “Skype”; in March 2014, “bestie” achieved OED validation.

Aside from cataloguing virtually every English word of the last thousand years, the
OED, in its online incarnation, offers a host of useful features for the lexicographically minded:

> Timelines
In graphic form, timelines are provided that highlight the year words are first recorded in the OED. Hence, the year I was born also featured the arrival of the words “cappuccino,” “cybernetics” and “transistor” whereas 1616, the year Shakespeare expired, saw the birth of “acquiescent,” “incidental” and “Kurd.”

> Top 1,000 Sources
If you guess Shakespeare as the most frequently quoted OED source, you’re not far wrong. The Bard, however, comes in second and is bested by the London Times (39,884 quotations versus 33,127). Rounding out the top five are: (3) Walter Scott, (4) the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and (5) Encyclopaedia Brittanica. The top North American source is the New York Times at No. 11 and The Globe and Mail takes Canadian honours at No. 212. I don’t think too many people would guess the Canadian runner-up: The Daily Colonist of Victoria at No. 431.

> Historical Thesaurus
The historical thesaurus is a taxonomic classification of the majority of senses in the OED. It can be thought of as a kind of semantic index. It can be used to navigate the dictionary by topic, find related terms and explore the history of a concept or meaning. It is divided in three categories: the External World, the Mind and Society. So, if you were researching “clairvoyance,” you would click on External World and then to the Supernatural heading, then to Paranormal and finally Clairvoyance, where you would find several entries such as “second sight” defined as “a supposed power by which occurrences in the future or things at a distance are perceived as though they were actually present.”

The feature that I find most useful in the
OED is the categories section, and in my next two Lexpert articles I will explore some of its dimensions.

Howard Richler’s book Word Play: Arranged  & Deranged Wit will be published in 2015.