The OED project: from 1993 to 1997

General

The OED is unusual in the world of historical lexicography for a number of reasons. The most significant is perhaps that it is a dictionary which seeks to cover a major international language as comprehensively as possible, not just over a long chronological period (the earliest records of English in the Anglo-Saxon age up to the present day), but also over a wide geographical area (in principle wherever English is or has been spoken over this period). But it is also significant in that it is funded not by a national government or confederation of governments, or through research grants, but by one of our major universities, and within that, by its university press.

Funding

Over a year ago, Tim Benbow, the Director of OUP's Dictionaries Department, and I drew up a report on the progress of the OED (initially for the OED's Advisory Committee and the University Press's senior officers, and ultimately for the Delegates of the Press). Our conclusions were that the initial estimates of the work required to complete the revision and updating of the Dictionary were proving, after about a year of actual editorial work, to be inadequate. I am therefore pleased to be able to report now that, after due consideration of the scholarly significance of the Dictionary as a flagship publication of the University Press, the Delegates of the Press have approved an extension of the project's budget from £20m to £34m, and have similarly approved an extension of the timescale of the project from 2005 to 2010.

OED3: an overview of progress

As the current timescale demonstrates, the revising and updating of the OED is a substantial undertaking. Most of the text has not been changed since its first publication between 1884 and 1928. Since then, scholarship has moved on by leaps and bounds. Many large-scale historical dictionaries of varieties of English, of specific periods of the language, and of particular subject areas, have been published or are in publication. Our understanding of the etymology of English words has been enhanced by countless dictionaries and scholarly articles, both covering English words and the vocabularies of other languages from which English has borrowed terms, either directly or indirectly. The academic world has new bibliographical standards (the first edition of the OED preceded the publication of the current standard short-title and union catalogues). The editions of works cited in the OED are often not those we would expect to use today. Furthermore, the range of works available for consultation by the Dictionary's editors has expanded since the end of the nineteenth century, with the publication of many more non-literary texts.

The third edition of the OED must take note of each of these developments, and more. Each is currently receiving extensive editorial attention, with the result that those entries currently revised document, as far as is possible, a more accurate picture of each word's history and development than has hitherto been feasible.

Our intention is that the OED should in future be a dynamic document, able to respond to scholarly (and other) discoveries relating to the language far more rapidly than it has been able to in the past. Antedatings and references to scholarly articles are now being regularly noted to the editors, both by traditional post and e-mail; each day the oed3 e-mail account (see details below) receives further antedatings, etc., from academics and others throughout the world, complementing the researches of the Dictionary's own historical and other reading programmes. The situation at present is that revised entries show earlier usages (to take just one aspect) for one in every four subsenses of each word covered, in many cases of fifty or more years. The generosity of scholars in sharing their discoveries with the Dictionary has been remarkable.

OED3: progress details

Revision of the Dictionary began, for various reasons, at the letter M. From this starting-point, the first-round revision of general (i.e. non-scientific) entries has already reached pen - about one-tenth of the full text. The parallel revision of scientific entries has reached plan. 25,000 of the 55,000 projected new entries are already in draft, developed from the results of the Dictionary's historical and modern reading programmes. Alongside this work the continuing reverification of tens of thousands of illustrative quotations from historical texts is well under way, and the results are being applied to the OED database. A complex computer-assisted routine is being employed to standardize the very varied short-titling evident in the current edition of the Dictionary, to assist subsequent electronic retrieval. The final editing of general and scientific entries, as well as of the OED's etymologies, has recently started.

Conclusion

Even in Dr Johnson's day, the task of editing a large-scale dictionary was no longer a single-handed activity. Today, the OED has a team of 42 editors working on different aspects of the text, as well as some fifty research assistants, keyboarders, proofreaders, etc., and a further 200 or so specialist consultants from whom advice may be obtained about any aspect of the language. But even now it is quite possible for anyone to read a text and to discover a usage not covered by any dictionary, or to predate the documentary evidence available to the OED's editors. The strength of the OED lies not solely in its electronic and card files, and its editorial staff, by in the support it receives from the users of the Dictionary, who supplement material and comment on potential alterations (to definitions, etymologies, etc.). If you discover something that is relevant to the revision of the OED, never assume that someone else has already told us about it - make sure that we know about it by telling us yourself!