General ExplanationsBack to contents
The decision to include in this edition some five thousand new items of vocabulary was taken in the light of several considerations. First, the pace of lexical innovation is rapid, and every dictionary must be continually enlarged or revised to accommodate the many new words and senses which become part of the language each year. Secondly, the compilation of new entries is a discrete editorial activity on which work could start straight away, independent of the revision which is envisaged as the business of subsequent phases of the project. Thirdly, as work on the Supplement came to an end, staff who were skilled in the compilation of OED entries, and a research base, in the form of a large quotation file, library researchers, consultants, etc., became available. Fourthly, other Oxford dictionaries, notably the Shorter OED, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, then in the process of revision, needed a selection of fully-researched new entries; this could be produced most efficiently by a central unit supplying material both to the New OED project and to other dictionaries.
Editorial work on new vocabulary began in 1983. It was recognized at the outset that the bulk of the material would lie in the early section of the alphabet. The lexical changes of the period (between ten and twenty years) since this part of the Supplement was prepared were yet to be recorded; moreover, the Supplement's coverage of the vocabulary already in use at that period was limited both by the relatively modest scale on which the work was initially planned and by the extent of the collections, which were inevitably small in the early stages. In this it resembled, though for different reasons, the earlier Supplement of 1933, of which R. W. Chapman wrote: ‘We projected accordingly ... a wedge-shaped Supplement, designed to bring the work to an even date; it is, so to speak, all ABC and no XYZ.’ But this asymmetry was a condition of the material being treated; there was no constraint on the editorial operation that confined it to one part of the alphabet. On the contrary, the storage of the material on the New OED database meant that very recent coinages from any point in the alphabet could as readily be accommodated.
The large quotation file maintained by the Oxford English Dictionaries Department was the basis for selecting items for inclusion in this edition, as it had been both for the first edition and for the Supplement. It offered, as before, the most comprehensive and objective basis for the selection of vocabulary items and the provision of supporting evidence. The file was growing at the rate of some 120,000 quotations per year, collected predominantly by means of a reading programme covering books, magazines, etc., representing the main varieties of English used throughout the world, but enhanced by scholarly contributions of specific new information, earlier illustrative quotations, and other lexicographical material.
But new resources had become available to lexicographers during the previous decade. Perhaps the most important were the large computer databases containing research abstracts, newspaper and periodical texts, and legal reports. At first, the computer-readable texts were used mainly to generate concordances. By the 1980s it was also possible, by rapidly searching the extensive text held on these databases, to pin down specific uses of individual words or phrases. These databases proved invaluable in tracing early uses of terms, in providing examples to complete the lexicographical record, and in supplying etymological information.
The databases of the 1980s rarely helped in the actual selection of new words for inclusion in the Dictionary. Inclusion was normally suggested by other means (such as evidence in the quotation file); the databases were used subsequently to provide additional information and to confirm the currency of the word or sense. It should also be stressed that these resources had to be used with some caution, as they might contain only recent text, or examples of English from only one area (notably North America), and they lacked the ability to identify the meaning in which a word was used in a given context or to distinguish it from the other meanings of that word. They did not, therefore, always provide a foundation for generalized, objective judgements on a particular linguistic or lexicographical point, but rather offered subsidiary evidence.
During the preparation of this edition, there was a general increase in interest in new words among lexicographers and their readers, particularly in North America and Great Britain. The two Barnhart Dictionaries of New English and their quarterly Companion presented well-researched material on neologisms. The Merriam-Webster Dictionaries published their record of new vocabulary in book form. Advance publicity for new dictionaries appearing throughout the world provided lists of the neologisms included in them. These were all valuable pointers to items that need to be included in the OED. And as ever, personal observation by members of the Dictionary Department and other contributors (the historical dictionary's own style of ‘oral evidence’) was a prolific source of further suggestions.
The selection of new words now included in the Dictionary is not intended to represent simply the emergent vocabulary of the last few years. To have selected solely according to this criterion would have highlighted terms which might not have achieved an established footing in the language, at the expense of other, older words. Indeed, one of the engaging aspects of historical lexicography is that terms which are held to be of recent origin often turn out to have existed for many years, though without achieving general currency. Recent neologisms have not been excluded, but have had to compete for their places alongside other candidates. In general, terms from most of the varieties of English are added, though the majority are current in American or British English, or in both. The vocabularies of modern computer technology, medicine, politics, economics, and popular culture are well represented, though not at the cost of terms from less obtrusive realms. Omission should not be equated with exclusion; a simple practical limit had to be set in accordance with the number of items that could be prepared in time for this edition.
There is no major difference between the editorial policy of the Supplement and that followed in the preparation of the further new entries; they are no more than an extension of the Supplement on a smaller scale, integrated, like the latter, into the main text of the Dictionary. In so far as these new entries have been compiled in accordance with the overall editorial policy of the second edition, they naturally embody a certain number of differences from the style of the Supplement. The stylistic changes have been described above. It was the policy of the Supplement to include earlier, further, and later examples of words and senses already in the Dictionary. This provision, being quite distinct from the addition of new entries, was not continued after the completion of the Supplement, but was deferred until such time as the full revision of the Dictionary may begin.
This edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains about 290,500 main entries, or about 38,000 (15 per cent) more than in the first edition. The extent of the text, however, has grown from around 44 million words to around 59 million, which represents an increase of 34 percent. There are 350 million printed characters in this work. In addition to the headwords of main entries, the Dictionary 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.
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General ExplanationsBack to contents |
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