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This new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains the whole text, unaltered in all essentials, of the twelve-volume first edition, which appeared in 1933 as a reprint of the ten-volume New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, itself originally published in parts between 1884 and 1928. It also contains the complete text of the four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, published between 1972 and 1986; this superseded the previous Supplement, which was issued in 1933 as a companion to the main work
The main purpose of this second edition is to present a version of the Dictionary in which these two parts, the twelve volumes and the four volumes, are amalgamated into a continuous, seamless text. Accordingly, every article from the Supplement has been either added in its proper alphabetical position (if a wholly new entry) or merged with its corresponding OED entry (following directions which the Supplement gives but the present edition omits, as now redundant). Instead of the sixteen volumes of large but unequal size in which the previous works were issued, it has been published in twenty slimmer and evenly sized volumes, which it is hoped will prove more convenient to use.
Although the raison d'être of this new edition is the integration of the two texts, and adherence to the instructions of the Supplement, whether explicitly stated or contextually implied, is the guiding principle of the work, the material brought over from the Supplement is by no means the only feature that differentiates the second edition from the first. New vocabulary has been added, certain important general revisions, and numerous local corrections, have been made, and the whole text has been given an entirely new typographical format. It is estimated that these changes, fuller details of which are given below, have affected (in different ways) the majority of the 290,500 entries contained in this edition, including virtually all articles on the commonest words. Together they have made this edition significantly richer in information, and more modern in aspect, than its distinguished predecessors.
Whereas the Supplement can be regarded for practical purposes as up to date, it is a matter of common knowledge that many elements of the original OED require revision. That is the very purpose for which the New OED Project, of which the present work is the first printed product, was initiated. Several of these requirements have been addressed in this edition. But the full revision and updating of the Dictionary (an outline agenda for which is given in the History section below) must be regarded as a long-term goal, demanding considerable resources, and therefore to be approached in stages. This new edition represents the first, and almost certainly the most arduous, step towards that goal.
The fundamental difference between this edition and its predecessors is, by its nature, quite invisible to the user of the Dictionary. Before the compilation of this edition, the OED and Supplement, which had only ever been typeset in hot metal, were computerized. The machine-readable version of the Dictionary resulting from computerization is now the master copy from which the present printed edition has been made. It is the version to which further modifications to the Dictionary will be applied, and from which new editions and offspring works of reference will be generated in the future.
But the machine-readable text is not distinct from the printed one merely by virtue of existing in a different physical medium, electronic instead of paper, or tape rather than type; or even by its priority in the production process. Much more important, it carries a whole new world of information. This has nothing to do with supplementary text. In addition to the conventional natural-language text taken over from the printed OED and Supplement, there is another layer of information: the ‘mark-up language’ or tagging system. The different categories of information into which the text can be partitioned, such as headword, pronunciation, variant form, quotation, or date of quotation, are each identified accurately and unambiguously by computer tags. These tags consist of short sequences of letters, mainly mnemonic in form (e.g. ‘quot’ for ‘quotation’), set off by delimiting characters from the conventional text which they mark. They do not appear on the printed page, but are there translated into various features of layout, typography, and punctuation. Unlike the tags, most of the latter, viewed logically, are to some degree ambiguous and redundant, though familiar and convenient to the user of the Dictionary. Thus, the tags that signify ‘headword’ and ‘date of quotation’ accompany these elements, but no instruction to print them in bold type appears in the machine-readable text; they could as easily be printed in capitals or sanserif if desired. The typographical realization of an element is relative, being determined by the requirements of the particular published form; accordingly, information of this kind has been largely, though not absolutely, purged from the electronic master text.
Only the presence of this structural information within the text has made it possible to integrate the OED and Supplement, and to perform the other systematic changes listed below, with so small a staff and in so short a time, and only because of it is the further revision and updating of the Dictionary feasible at all. It is also the prerequisite for the conversion of the OED into a publicly available electronic database. The project team believes the addition of this information to have been, without doubt, their chief contribution to the future of the Oxford English Dictionary.
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