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This Dictionary includes some words which are or are asserted to be proprietary names or trade marks. Their inclusion does not imply that they have acquired for legal purposes a non-proprietary or general significance nor any other judgement concerning their legal status. In cases where the editorial staff have established in the records of the Patent Offices of the United Kingdom and of the United States that a word is registered as a proprietary name or trade mark this is indicated, but no judgement concerning the legal status of such words is made or implied thereby.
1. For a full discussion, the reader is referred to M. K. C. MacMahon, ‘James Murray and the Phonetic Notation in the New English Dictionary’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1985, pp. 72-112.
2. The above diagram will explain itself, as an attempt to express to the eye the aspect in which the vocabulary is here presented, and also some of the relations of its elements typical and aberrant. The centre is occupied by the ‘common’ words, in which literary and colloquial usage meet. ‘Scientific’ and ‘foreign’ words enter the common language mainly through literature; ‘slang’ words ascend through colloquial use; the ‘technical’ terms of crafts and processes, and the ‘dialect’ words, blend with the common language both in speech and literature. Slang also touches on one side the technical terminology of trades and occupations as in ‘nautical slang’, ‘Public School slang’, ‘the slang of the Stock Exchange’, and on another passes into true dialect. Dialects similarly pass into foreign languages. Scientific terminology passes on one side into purely foreign words, on another it blends with the technical vocabulary of art and manufactures. It is not possible to fix the point at which the ‘English language’ stops, along any of these diverging lines.
3. ‘Scientific terms’, Supplement, Volume I, p. xix.
4. The French words adopted before 1400 were generally taken from the Anglo-French, or French spoken for several centuries in England, where they had undergone further phonetic change. It was in strict conformity with linguistic facts that Chaucer told of his Prioresse:
...Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire vnknowe:for the Anglo-French dialect of the fourteenth century was not only from Parisian, but from all dialects of continental French. In its origin a mixture of various Norman and other Northern French dialects, afterwards mixed with and greatly modified by Angevin, Parisian, Poitevin, and other elements, and more and more exposed to the overpowering influence of literary French, it had yet received, on this side of the Channel, a distinct and independent development, following, in its phonology especially, English and not continental tendencies. As the natural speech of the higher and educated classes, it died out in the fourteenth century; but it maintained a kind of artificial existence for a longer period, and was used (in an increasingly debased form) for writing law-reports down to the seventeenth century, in which stage it still influenced the spelling of English words. Its forms survive in many of our terminations: armour, colour, glorious, gracious, envious, perilous, arrival, espousal, language, enjoy, benefit, gaoler, caitif, are the actual Anglo-French forms, as distinct from those of continental Old and Modern French. As a rule, it may be assumed that the original form of every Middle English word of French origin was identical with the Anglo-French form; and that, where a gap appears between the earliest known English form of a word and its Old French equivalent, that gap would be filled up by the recovery of the Anglo-French and earliest English form. It was not until the fifteenth century, and chiefly at the hands of Caxton, that continental French forms and spellings began directly to influence our language.
5. In the case of some well-known and often-quoted works, where the reference is always to a standard edition or modern literal reprint, it was not thought necessary by the first edition's editors to insert the date of it. Owing to the continual growth of literary and historical scholarship during and after their time, many of these are now no longer the most recent standard edition.
6. This account is reproduced, with only minor modifications, from the ‘Historical Introduction’ to the OED published in 1933.
7. The Editor's own account of this project may be read in the prefatory sections of the four volumes of the Supplement, especially the Introduction to Volume I (A-G), on which the present narrative has drawn.
8. Supplement, Volume II. p. vii.
9. The feasibility of using an optical scanner to convert the text of the Dictionary into machine-readable form was also investigated by OUP at this point, as also by others later. It was generally agreed that the complexity of the structure and the irregularity of the type would require an excessively large amount of editorial intervention in the scanning process; and it was not clear how an adequate framework of structural mark-up could be introduced into the text alongside this method of data conversion.
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