Oxford English Dictionary

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The Oxford English Dictionary (abbreviated OED) is a dictionary published by Oxford University Press, considered the most erudite and complete dictionary of the English language, as well as the main point of reference for its etymological study. In the same way, it gives rise to a complete and defined explanation of its syntax and its same grammar. As of November 30, 2005, it includes some 301,000 main entries, through 350 million characters. In addition to the main entries, it contains 157,000 bold combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 bold italic phrases and combinations, for a total of 616,500 expressions. There are 137,000 pronunciations, 249,000 etymologies, 577,000 cross references, and 2,412,400 illustrative citations.

The intention of the work is to collect all known uses and variants of each word in all varieties of English around the world, past and present, as well as their etymologies, history, pronunciation, etc. It is the starting point for many studies of the English language, and the order in which the different spellings of words are listed there has a great influence on written English in many countries.

The realization of such a work is due to the encyclopedic tradition of the XIX century, which managed to unite the efforts of a multitude of readers under the coordination of James Murray, the original editor of the dictionary.

Origins

The dictionary originally had nothing to do with the university; It was conceived in London as a project of the Philological Society, when Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall became dissatisfied with the then-existing English-language dictionaries.

In June 1857 they founded the Unregistered Words Committee, in order to find words that had not yet been listed and defined by dictionaries. But Trench's November report was not just a list of unrecorded words; it was a study "On Certain Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries". These, according to what he said, were seven:

Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
inconsistent coverage of related word families
Incorrect dates for the first use of each word
Frequent omission of history of obsolete meanings of words
Inappropriate distinction between synonyms
Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
Space wasted in inappropriate or redundant content

Trench suggested that a new and really complete dictionary was essential for the proposed purposes; one that relied on the contributions of large numbers of voluntary readers, reading books, copying passages illustrating the various actual uses of words, and submitting them to the publisher. In 1858 the society agreed to start a project called the "New English Dictionary on Historical Principles" (abbreviated "NED"), i.e. "A new dictionary of English based on historical principles".

The first editors

Trench played a pivotal role in the early months of the project, but his ecclesiastical career prevented him from giving the dictionary the continued attention it needed for what they perceived could easily be a decade. So Trench withdrew in favor of Herbert Coleridge, who became the dictionary's first editor.

On May 12, 1860, Coleridge's work plan was published, and the investigation was launched. His house became the first editorial office; he commissioned a 54-slot locker where he would end up storing 100,000 tokens. In April 1861 the first proof pages of the dictionary were published. Later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis at just 31 years of age.

The editorship then fell to Furnivall, who had great enthusiasm and knowledge, but clearly lacked the temperament necessary for such a long-term project. At first, he was very dynamic, recruiting many assistants and taking home two tons of reader tokens, which in many cases he passed on to his assistants. But as the months and years passed, the project stalled. Furnivall began to lose contact with his assistants, some of whom came to believe that the project had been abandoned; others died and his tokens were not returned. The entire collection of H-word citation cards was later found in Tuscany, others were mistaken for leftover paper and used to light the fire.

In the 1870s, Furnival talked to Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol about succeeding him, but neither accepted the position. But then, at a Society meeting in 1876, the lexicographer James Murray declared his willingness to try.

The Oxford Publishers

At the same time, the Society was becoming concerned with the publication of what was now obvious must be an immensely large book. Over the years, there had been discussions with various publishers about either producing test pages or possibly publishing the entire work, but no agreement had yet been reached. Among those publishers were Cambridge and Oxford University Press (OUP).

Finally, in 1879, after two years of negotiations involving Sweet, Furnivall and Murray, Oxford University Press agreed not only to publish the dictionary, but also to pay a salary as editor to Murray (who by then was also the president of the Philological Society). They hoped that the work could thus be completed in another ten years.

It was Murray who really got the project off the ground, and was able to scale it up. Because he had many children, he chose not to use his own home (in the London suburb of Mill Hill) as his workplace; Thus, he erected for himself and his assistants an iron building lined with pine, which he called "Scriptorium". It was provided with 1029 boxes and many shelves.

Murray then tracked down and assembled the files already collected by Furnivall, but judged them inadequate as readers had focused on rare and interesting words, so they had many more citations for rarely used words than for more common ones. He thus made a new request for readers, which was widely advertised in newspapers and distributed in bookstores and libraries. This time readers were specifically asked to report "as many citations as you can of common words", as well as any that seemed "odd, outdated, out-of-date, new, quirky, or misused. peculiar". Murray arranged for the Pennsylvania philologist Francis March to manage the process in North America. Soon they had 1,000 tokens arriving at the Scriptorium each day, and by 1882 there were 3,500,000.

On February 1, 1884, 23 years after Coleridge's proof pages, the first installment, or fascicle, of the royal dictionary was finally published. The full title was now "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society", that is, "A new dictionary of English based on historical principles; based mainly on material compiled by the Philological Society". Its 352 pages, containing the words from "A" until 'Ant', they were priced at 12 pence in the UK. The disappointing sales total was about 4,000 copies.

It was now clear to the OUP that it would take too long to complete the work if the publishing agreements were not reviewed. So they provided additional funds for assistants, but in return they made two new demands on Murray: the first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford, which he did in 1885. He again built a Scriptorium on his property (to appease a neighbour, this had to be partly underground), and the Oxford Post Office rewarded him by installing a post box right in front of his house.

Murray was more reluctant about the second demand: that if he couldn't meet the schedule, he should hire a second editor-in-chief who would work in parallel, outside of his supervision, on words from different parts of the alphabet. He didn't want to share the work, and he thought he could go faster as he gained experience. But he couldn't, and was finally compelled by the OUP's Philip Gell. Thus, Henry Bradley, whom Murray had hired as his assistant in 1884, was promoted and began freelancing in 1888 in a dependency of the British Museum in London. In 1896 Bradley moved to Oxford, and worked at the university itself.

Gell continued to harass both publishers in order to make the company more commercial, cutting expenses and speeding up production, to the point that the project nearly collapsed; but once this was reported in the press, public opinion supported the publishers. Gell was then fired, and the university reversed its cost-cutting policy. If the publishers believed the dictionary needed to be made larger than anticipated, it would be; it was such an important job that he had to spend as much time and money as necessary to finish it properly.

But neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it finished. Murray died in 1915. He had been responsible for the words beginning with A-D , H-K , O-P , and T , that is, about half of the complete dictionary; Bradley died in 1923. He had been tasked with working on words beginning E-G, L-M, S-Sh, St, and W-We. By then two other editors had been promoted from assistant to freelance, so work continued without much trouble. William Craigie, starting in 1901, was responsible for terms beginning with N, Q-R, Si-Sq, U-V, and Wo-Wy. Because the OUP had concluded that London was too far from Oxford for publishers to work there, after 1925 Craigie worked in Chicago, Illinois, where he had accepted a professorship. The fourth publisher was C. T. Onions, who began in 1914 and finished the remaining tranches: Su-Sz, Wh-Wo, and X-Z.

The fascicles

By the beginning of 1894, a total of 11 fascicles had been published, approximately one per year: four for A and B, five for C, and two for E. Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last of each group was shorter to end the letter change (which would eventually become a volume change). It was then decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent installments; Thus, starting in 1895, there was a new 64-page fascicle every three months. If there was enough material, 128 or even 192 pages could be published at once. This pace of work was maintained until World War I forced cutbacks. This same material was also published in the larger format of the original fascicles, for those who preferred it, as sufficient pages became available.

Another change made in 1895 was the change of title to Oxford English Dictionary (abbreviated OED), in English "Oxford English Dictionary", but only on the outer covers of the fascicles, since the original title, which appeared everywhere else, was preserved as official.

The 125th and final issue, comprising the words between "Wise" to the end of the "W", was published on April 19, 1928, being immediately followed by the complete edition of the dictionary in bound volumes.

The first edition and the first supplement

It was planned to publish the "New English Dictionary" in ten volumes, beginning with A, C, D, F, H >, L, O, Q, Si, and Ti; but, as the project progressed, the later volumes became larger and larger, and although the complete 1928 edition officially kept the intended numbering, volumes IX and X were actually published as "half volumes" 34;, divided by His and V, respectively. The complete edition was also available as a set of 20 half volumes, in two types of binding. The price was 50 or 55 guineas, depending on the format and binding.

It had been 44 years since the publication of A-Ant and, of course, the English language had continued to change and develop, so the first volumes were noticeably out of date. The solution was to produce a supplement, listing all the words and meanings that had appeared since those pages had first been published; this also gave the opportunity to correct detected errors and omissions. Purchasers of the 1928 edition were promised a free copy of the supplement when it appeared.

The supplement was again produced by two editors working in parallel. Craigie, now in the United States, did most of the research on the usages of American English, also editing volumes L-R and U-Z, while Onions did A-K and S-T. This work took another five years.

In 1933 the complete dictionary was reissued, now for the first time under the official title of the "Oxford English Dictionary". Volumes after the first six were adapted to match and remove the "half-volume" numbering: the main dictionary now consisted of twelve volumes, numbered as such, and beginning respectively with A, C, D, F, H, L, N, Poyesye, S, Sole, T, and V >. The supplement was listed as the 13th volume. The price of the dictionary was reduced to 20 guineas, which must have dismayed buyers of the 1928 edition when they received their free supplements.

The second supplement and the second edition

In 1933 the work of Oxford University on the great dictionary had ceased; Once the work was finished, the appointment cards were stored. But, of course, the English language continued to change, and after 20 years the obsolescence of the dictionary became glaringly obvious.

There were three possible ways to update it:

The cheapest would be to leave the current version as it was and simply to make a new supplement, or perhaps one or two volumes; but then whoever sought a word or meaning would never be sure that the information was still valid, and would have to look at three different sites.
The new material could have been added to the existing supplement to form an even greater supplement.
The optimal solution for dictionary users would be to rewrite and rewrite the entire dictionary, including each change in its proper alphabetical location; but of course, this solution would be the most expensive, with about 15 volumes probably required.

The OUP chose the intermediate solution, renewing the supplement. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 as editor, and Onions, aged 84, was still able to make some contributions. The work was expected to cost between seven and ten years. Ultimately, it took 29 years, the supplement growing to encompass 4 volumes, beginning with A, H, O, and Sea b>. They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986, respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes (17 if we count the first supplement).

By then it was clear that the most appropriate support for the full text of the dictionary was computerized. This required retyping everything on a computer, but would greatly facilitate the unification of the text and its future updates, as well as allowing automatic searches.

This is how the New Oxford English Dictionary ("New Oxford English Dictionary") or NOED project began. It was not enough to retype all the text; furthermore, all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done using the SGML markup language, along with a specialized search engine and special software to access it. In 1985 it was agreed that part of the software development would be done at the University of Waterloo (Canada), at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford"), directed by F. W. Tompa and Gastón Gonnet; this search technology would be the basis for the Open Text Corporation. The hardware, the database and the rest of the software, the heads of development, and the programmers of the project were contributed by the British subsidiary of IBM; the color editor for the project, LEXX, was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM.

By 1989, the NOED project had already achieved its fundamental goals, and editors Edmund Weiner and John Simpson, working online, had managed to combine the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of new material into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" it was removed from the name, thus publishing the second edition of the OED (the OED2); The first edition then began to be called OED1.

The OED2 was published in 20 volumes. For the first time, there was no attempt to divide them by full letters, being made in similar sizes. The 20 volumes began with A, B.B.C., Cham, Creel, Dvandra, Follow, Hat, Interval, Look, Moul, Ow, Poise, Quemadero, Rob, Ser, Soot, Su, Thru, Unemancipated, and Wave.

While the content of OED2 is essentially a simple rearrangement of previous material, it was an opportunity to make long-overdue formatting changes. The title of each entry would no longer be capitalized, allowing the user to quickly see which words are capitalized. And since Murray had developed his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard at his time, he took advantage of it by adopting the International Phonetic Alphabet.

New material was published in 1993 in the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series ("Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series"), consisting of two small volumes in 1993 and another in 1997, making a total of 23 volumes for the complete works. There are no plans for more addenda volumes, nor is anything from the third edition (or OED3) expected to be published in fascicles.

The Compact Editions

Meanwhile, in 1971, the entire contents of the 13th volume OED1 from 1933 was reprinted as a Compact Edition consisting of just two volumes. This was achieved by photographically reducing each page in half the width and height, so that four of the original pages could be shown on each page ("4-up" format). The volumes began with "A" and by "P", with the Supplement included at the end of the second volume.

The Compact Edition was sold in a box that also included, in a small drawer, a magnifying glass to help read the reduced print. Many copies were sold through book clubs, which sold them at a lower price as a promotion to their members.

In 1987 the second supplement was published as the third volume in the same format as the Compact Edition. For OED2, in 1991, the compact version was reduced to a third of the original version, so that each page showed 9. This required further expansion, but also allowed the entire dictionary to be published in a single volume by first time. Despite the publication of those volumes, many book clubs continued to offer the 1971 two-volume version.

Digital versions

The Oxford English Dictionary has been digitized and published on CD-ROM, and has also been published on the Internet. There are three versions:

Version 1 in 1992: it was identical in content to the Second Printed Edition, and the CD was not protected against copies.
Version 2 1999: had some changes in the content, and updated the software with improvements in the search engine, but the protection against copies made it very difficult to use and even towards the program denying the use of the OUP body in the middle of a demonstration of the product.
Version 3 2002: has more words and improvements in the software, although the protection against copies remains as unforgivable as in the previous version.

In March 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) was made available to subscribers. The online database contains the complete OED2, and is also updated quarterly with the modifications that will be included in OED3. Thus, the online edition is the most up-to-date available.

Since the individual use price of this edition, even after the 2004 rebate, is £195 or US$295 each year, most subscribers are large organizations such as universities, libraries or businesses. Some of them do not use the Oxford English Dictionary Online portal, but have legally downloaded the entire database onto their own servers.

In 2004, a slightly more attractive payment method was introduced, offering residents of North or South America to pay $29.95 per month to access the website. This allows people who don't use it regularly to save compared to the annual payment.

The Third Edition

The future Third Edition ("Third Edition"), or OED3, is expected to be a nearly complete revision of the work. Every word is being scrutinized to improve the accuracy of definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and historical citations; this task requires the efforts of more than 300 experts, researchers, readers and consultants, with an expected cost of about US$55 million. The end result is expected to double the current length of the text. The dictionary style will also change slightly. The original text was more literary, since most of the quotes came from novels, plays, and other literary sources. The new edition, however, will cite all kinds of printed resources, such as cookbooks, technical manuals, specialized publications, or rock music lyrics. The rate at which new words are added has increased to about 4,000 a year. The expected date to complete the work is the year 2037.

New content can be consulted through the online edition or through the updated version on CD-ROM.

In 1993 the editor-in-chief is John Simpson. Since each publisher's first work tends to require more revision than their later work, and since previous editions started with the letter A, it was decided to compensate for this by starting with the letter M. When the online version was released in March 2000, already included the first batch of revised (officially draft) entries, from "M" up to "mahurat", with subsequent installments of the text published quarterly. In December 2008 the section that went up to "reamy" was published. As new work is done with words from other parts of the alphabet, it is included in quarterly submissions. In March 2008 the editors announced that they would alternate quarters between batches moving up the alphabet and batches reviewing "key English words throughout the alphabet, as well as other words that make up the alphabetic block around them".

The production of the new edition is fully computerized, especially since June 2005, when the "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application" (which could be translated as "Perfect singing and dancing editorial and notational application") or "Pasadena". With this system, based on XML, the attention of lexicographers can be directed more to questions of content than to questions of presentation, such as the numbering of definitions. The new system has also simplified the use of the citation database, and allowed New York staff to work directly on the dictionary in the same way as their Oxford colleagues.

Computers are also used to search the Internet for evidence of current use, as well as receive email submissions of citations from readers and the general public.

Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the general public to help by submitting citations for 50 selected recent words. The results were featured in a BBC television series, Balderdash and Piffle. OED readers continue to submit citations; about 200,000 a year are received.

Spelling

The OED lists words first by their British spellings (for example, "labor" and "centre"), followed by their variants ("labor", "center"). OUP policy dictates that the suffixes "-ize" instead of "-ise" for many more common words ending in "-ise", even if the root is Latin rather than Greek. The reason for this policy (contrary to popular belief that '-ize' is an Americanism) is explained on this page Archived September 29, 2007, at the Wayback Machine (in English).

The English phrase "The group analyzed labor statistics published by the organization" is an example of OUP regulations. This spelling (which according to the IANA registry is denoted as en-GB-oed) is the one used by the United Nations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and other organizations, as well as by many academic publications, such as the Nature or Biochemical Journal and the Times Literary Supplement.

Criticism

Despite its claim to authority over the English language, the OED has been criticized on many counts, including its sheer size, its claims to authority, and, above all, its influence.

In his 1982 review of the supplement, Oxford University linguist Roy Harris complained that criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not only with a dictionary, but also with a national institution& #34;, which "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune to criticism on principle" Harris criticizes what he sees as the "black-and-white lexicography" of the dictionary, by prioritizing the written language over the spoken one, especially certain forms of printed work. He further considers that while neologisms from respected & # 34;literary & # 34; as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf are included, the use of words in newspapers and other less "respectable" carry much less weight, although they may be more valid in common usage. He writes that 'black and white lexicography is also black and white in that it takes responsibility for pronouncing its authority on correct usage or incorrect", being a dictionary of prescriptive rather than descriptive grammar. For Harris, this prescriptive classification of certain uses is wrong, and the complete omission of certain forms and uses has a cumulative effect of representing the "social biases" of its (presumably wealthy and well-educated) editors. Harris also criticizes the editors for their "scholarly conservatism", further accusing them of prim Victorian morality, citing the non-inclusion of "several hundred-year-old swear words" until 1972.

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