Books - Oxford English Dictionary

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	Books - Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). Generally regarded as the most comprehensive and scholarly dictionary of the English language, it includes about 301,100 main entries, as of November 30, 2005, comprising over 350 million printed characters. In addition to the headwords of main entries, the OED contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives in bold type, and 169,000 phrases and combinations in bold italic type, making a total of 616,500 word-forms. There are 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and 2,412,400 illustrative quotations. The latest complete printed version of the dictionary (Second Edition, 1989) was 21,730 pages with 291,500 entries.

The policy of the OED is to attempt to record all known uses and variants of a word in all varieties of English, worldwide, past and present. To quote the 1933 Preface:

:The aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang.

The OED is the starting point for much scholarly work regarding words in English. Its choice of the order in which to list variant spellings of headwords is influential on written English in many countries.

Origins

The dictionary had no university connection originally; it was conceived in London as a project of the Philological Society, when Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall had become dissatisfied with the available dictionaries of English.

In June 1857 they formed an "Unregistered Words Committee" with the goal of finding words not listed and defined in existing dictionaries. But the report that Trench presented that November was not a simple list of unregistered words; it was a study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries. These, he said, were sevenfold:

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 between synonyms
Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content

Trench suggested that nothing short of a new and truly comprehensive dictionary would do: one that would be based on contributions from a large number of volunteer readers, who would read books, copy out passages illustrating various actual uses of words onto quotation slips, and mail them to the editor. In 1858 the Society agreed in principle to the project: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED).

The first editors

Trench played a key role in the first months of the project, but his ecclesiastical career meant that he could not give the dictionary the continued attention that it needed over a period that, it was realized, might easily be as long as ten years. So Trench withdrew, and it was Herbert Coleridge who became the dictionary's first editor.

On May 12, 1860, Coleridge's plan for the work was published, and the research was set in motion. His home became the first editorial office; he ordered a grid of 54 pigeon-holes in which could eventually be arrayed 100,000 quotation slips. In April 1861, the first sample pages of the dictionary were published. Later that month, Coleridge, aged just 31, died of tuberculosis.

The editorship then fell to Furnivall, who had great enthusiasm and knowledge, but definitely lacked the temperament for such a long-term project. His energetic start saw many assistants recruited and two tons of readers' slips and other materials delivered to his house, and in many cases passed on to these assistants. But as months and years passed, the project languished. Furnivall began to lose track of his assistants, some of whom assumed that the project was abandoned; others died and their slips were not returned. The entire set of quotation slips for words starting with H was later found in Tuscany; others were assumed to be waste paper and burned as tinder.

In the 1870s Furnivall approached Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him, but neither one accepted the post. But then, at a Society meeting in 1876, James Murray declared his willingness to try.

The Oxford editors

At the same time the Society had become concerned about the publication of what it was now clear would have to be an immensely large book. Various publishers had been approached over the years, either to produce sample pages or for the possible publication of the whole, but no agreements had been reached. These had included both the Cambridge and the Oxford University Press (OUP).

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Books - Oxford English Dictionary

Origins

The first editors

The Oxford editors

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