Bibliography and textual accuracy

The Dictionary's definitions are informed by the evidence of the language collected by thousands of ‘readers’ from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Much additional information has also been provided by scholars and others through their publications and correspondence with the Dictionary's editorial staff. Nowadays, documentary information is also available from computerized sources: concordances, large full-text databases, etc.

Many of the quotations published in earlier editions of the Dictionary will also be found in the revised material. Also, many new quotations have been added. It is important that these represent the texts as originally published, and in order to achieve this, many quotations are being reverified in more reliable editions than those from which they were originally collected. A typical example might be a sixteenth-century text ‘read’ by the Dictionary in a modernized and amended version, perhaps edited by a Victorian scholar from a late edition.

Over the course of the revision, many thousands of texts will be re-examined in this way, and the results fed text by text on to the online database. Reverification takes place principally by printing out all of the quotations from a particular source (typically illustrated throughout the Dictionary) and comparing these against the appropriate edition, making amendments when necessary. At present, 2700 texts have been re-examined in this way. The process of reverification will continue through the period of revision, and doubtless beyond, and will affect entries already published online in their revised and updated form. This is one reason why revised entries are marked as ‘draft’ versions and not as published in a final form. A typical example might be the following, which shows the version of a quotation as represented in the First Edition of the Dictionary, and the text as amended after reverification. Such changes will occur throughout the revised material.

The conversion of the text from the edition of 1570 to the first edition of 1509 shows several differences in spelling, both of the headword itself (from magnanimitie to magnanymyte) and of words in the surrounding text. The revised bibliographical information associated with the quotation shows both Barclay's initial and the author of the original work of which Barclay's text was a translation.

Similar improvements across the database occur through the process of rechecking the bibliographical information associated with each quotation. Advances in scholarship mean that bibliographical information available to the original editors of the Dictionary is sometimes no longer considered accurate. This may concern the dating of texts, the authorship ascribed to them, the style by which they are cited, and many other features. As with so much in historical lexicography, this bibliographical enhancement is a potentially never-ending activity, and the reader will become aware that changes in the bibliographical data are being made gradually to the online database over the course of the revision project. In this and other ways the revised Dictionary will remain a ‘moving document’, susceptible of improvement and alteration as scholarship advances and as the language continues to change.