"He said true things, but called them by wrong names" - an approach to revising the quotations in the OED

An important feature of OED revision is the reverification of certain categories of illustrative quotation used in earlier editions of the Dictionary. The accuracy of the quotations as a general record of usage is not in doubt, but there are many occasions when the text is not cited from what would nowadays be regarded as the most appropriate edition. Using the online version of the OED and searching software designed by the OED's computing group, quotations taken from a particular author or from an individual work can be brought together and printed out, then checked carefully against the relevant editions to ensure that they are correctly dated, that the citation style is consistent, and that the quotation text itself is presented accurately (paying particular attention, of course, to any changes this involves to the headword being illustrated).

We are extremely grateful to Professor Noel Kinnamon of Mars Hill College, North Carolina, for his voluntary work correcting the quotations from Sidney's Arcadia (having started in a smaller way with the Countess of Pembroke's Psalms), as well as to Dr Rhonda Blair of the Burton project at Washington State University, who has used her project's many electronic texts to help our work on the 1200-plus quotations from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The eventual result will be far greater accuracy and consistency in the quotations cited in the third edition of OED. With world-wide library resources, computers, and a keen army of researchers (whose task often turns out to be far from simple "checking", and more like Holmesian detective work), we will be able to improve significantly the remarkable body of illustrative examples that were amassed for the first and second editions.