Chronology and the historical method

The Oxford English Dictionary is based upon ‘historical principles’, and the meanings of individual words entered in the Dictionary are therefore ordered chronologically, within a semantic framework resembling a family tree. Earlier meanings (or related groups of meanings) of a word are placed before later ones, and it is typically possible to track the semantic development of a word over time throughout an entry.

The First Edition of the Dictionary sometimes imposed a ‘logical’ ordering on the documentary evidence, especially when it was felt that further information, if available, would confirm this interpretation. In the revised material, senses are ordered systematically on the basis of the evidence now available. This has been made possible in large part because a considerably wider body of evidence is now available to the editors. Also, it avoids a tendency to impose formulaic orderings based on proposed semantic hierarchies (e.g. divine; human; animal) which is sometimes apparent in the First Edition of the Dictionary. Needless to say, the mechanics of borrowing and semantic shift do not always work in this formulaic sequence. This principle has not been applied to Old English material, as the amount of surviving literature (much of it in late copies) is too small to allow of reliable chronological interpretation.

An interesting result of this reordering occurs in entries for many Early Modern terms derived from proper names. In the past, the Dictionary tended to present the evidence for the adjective before that for the noun, whether or not the documentary evidence substantiated this. For example, the First Edition orders the adjective Machiavellian before the equivalent noun (in this case, both are presented in the same entry): this is done despite the fact that the noun is recorded earlier. The present revised material reverses the ordering of the parts of speech, showing the noun as the older; this still reflects the nature of the evidence, even though earlier examples have been uncovered for the term in both parts of speech. Similarly, the ordering of the adjective and noun is reversed at Magian, for which an earlier example of the noun has also been found. Madagascarian was previously entered only as an adjective. New evidence shows that the equivalent noun preceded this by a number of years.

It should be noted, however, that main entries which are homographs are listed according to a fixed sequence of parts of speech, as is generally the case in the First Edition of the Dictionary.