The North American Reading Program

Probably all readers of this newsletter will know that the OED is founded on 'quotations' - short samples of language normally taken from printed sources illustrating the use of a particular word. Looking back from the present, it is quite a surprise to recall that ten years ago virtually all quotations came to us on paper. Other dictionaries were already making use of electronic collections of linguistic data but most of these had had to be created from scratch, a process which was still time-consuming and costly.

What changed things for us was one of those half-foreseen results of a change of direction made for other reasons. We decided in 1989 to begin to collect quotations from North American sources in North America itself, instead of having the temerity to think that editors sitting in Oxford, England, speaking British English, could realistically organize this collection remotely. The new departure was christened the North American Reading Program or NARP. Its director, Jeffery Triggs, was a keen computer user, and soon after moving into his office, generously provided by the Bellcore research centre, he initiated a ground-breaking programme of quotation collection exclusively in electronic form. Instead of being written out on slips of paper, the quotations were entered into a simple template that could be used on any computer and e-mailed to Jeffery, who would then convert them to OED format and mail them across the Atlantic.

The advantages of this online material were immediately and excitingly apparent: instead of having in our files only the same number of examples as the number of catchwords under which the slips were filed, we potentially had quotations for every single word, catchword or not, in the database. With each 'slip' representing a quotation for every word contained in it, such a programme is highly cost-effective: naturally we soon began to convert our British reading programme to the same system.

As we have reported elsewhere, our North American presence will soon move into a new phase with the editing of North American vocabulary taking place in the land of its birth, and the reading of North American sources will continue to be a vital part of this. Databases and corpora of online text are now abundant and for us are another vital source of raw material; we no longer need to feel that we ourselves should create or acquire a corpus of historical full-text sources, since these are readily available on the Internet. We will always be grateful to Jeffery for encouraging our early steps in this field, for causing the North American Reading Program, over ten years, to yield round about a million quotations, for pioneering an online version of the OED, for his constant advice on using the UNIX operating system to produce seemingly magical results, and for converting the word-processed text of the Dictionary of South African English into a database compatible with our other inhouse resources.