Is there anybody out there? - a call for research materials

During the planning stages of OED revision, it was decided that the editors should seek to involve the international academic community actively in the project by encouraging scholars to submit information (such as antedatings) which might otherwise have been overlooked, and to make further suggestions for revision, particularly in their own subject area. Letters were sent initially to the Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books outlining the plans for the Third Edition and appealing to scholars to send in any information uncovered in the course of their research which could have a bearing on or help to improve the OED text.

The reaction from the academic community to these two initial appeals was generous and enthusiastic; letters and electronic-mail messages poured into the OED offices suggesting possible revisions to OED entries in the light of recent research. Following this encouraging response, a much broader appeal was launched on several fronts. Short articles along the same lines as the original letter were sent to about sixty historical, scientific, and linguistic journals around the world. As well as this, flyers were printed and sent out to major libraries, university departments, and research institutions in Britain and the United States, as well as to individual contributors. Librarians and heads of departments have been most cooperative in agreeing to display these. Notices were also posted on electronic bulletin-boards devoted to specialized periods or subjects, in some cases on the initiative of contributors who had responded to the published appeal. As a result of this publicity, a steady flow of extremely useful material has made its way into the files of the OED.

Contributions cover areas such as historical words and senses not in the dictionary, corrections to definitions and etymologies, recent usages of words thought to be obsolete, and, above all, antedatings to OED entries. Some interesting examples of the latter include a three-hundred-year antedating for "kimono"; a twenty-year antedating for the adjective "Byronian" from the letters of Lord Byron himself; Thomas Carlyle's use of the term "underclass" almost a century earlier than OED's first attestation; and a 1670 example of "biggin" (a type of pot or drinking vessel) which casts serious doubts on the OED's suggestion that the item was named after a certain Biggin who is said to have invented it in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. We are also fortunate in having received many offers of assistance, such as that of Professor Gary Rosenberg, of the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, who will advise on revisions to malacology entries in the Dictionary.

Overall, the call for research materials is proving an extremely valuable exercise, and we are confident that it will result in a steady flow of detailed information into the department in the future. Not only is such cooperation essential in the face of the sheer quantity of work to be addressed, but it is gratifying to think that such an exercise is very much in the spirit of the early days of the Dictionary, when Frederick Furnivall and Sir James Murray mobilized an army of voluntary readers and contributors to provide the raw material for the first edition.