The contribution of women to the OED

If you asked most people to imagine the offices of the OED, they would probably paint a picture of leather-book-lined shelves, with studious men consulting large tomes in dusty seriousness. Visitors are often surprised to find that we work in a large, light and glassy office with all the usual information technology and online databases at our fingertips. Such an environment would have been unimaginable to the Dictionary's original compilers—and just as unimaginable would have been the representation of women at all levels on the staff. Women have always worked on the OED, just as they have always been quoted in it; when we began researching this article, however, it became clear that the interesting questions lie in the kinds of work women do, and did, for the OED, and in which ways and contexts their words have been used as quotation evidence in the entries.

Group photographs dating from the early twentieth century show that the staff of the New English Dictionary (as the first edition of the OED is known) was mainly, but not exclusively, male. The surnames of the few women, usually standing at the back of the group, reveal that their presence on the staff owes something to their illustrious male relatives. Henry Bradley's daughter Eleanor, and two of James Murray's daughters, Elsie and Rosfrith, for example are recurrent figures. Eleanor Bradley was a member of Bradley's, and later Charles Onions's, editorial staff for thirty-five years, from 1897–1932. Elsie and Rosfrith, like all Murray's children, earned pocket money by sorting slips for their father, and as adults they went on to work as assistants on the editorial staff for over twenty years. It is difficult to be sure exactly how much responsibility these women were given, and how they interacted with the other editorial staff. We know that originally they were given fairly menial tasks, but that Eleanor, at least, went on to write definitions. She also prepared the entry for make-up and other compound headwords following on from the entry for make.

Several of the wives of male members of the NED editorial staff also became closely, if often unofficially, involved with the project. Ada Murray was instrumental in her husband's decision to accept the editorship, acted as his unpaid secretary for many years, read for the OED, and assisted the project in many other ways. During the First World War, Craigie's department was almost emptied of men, so his wife helped him to pre-sort material relating to the letter U. After the war was over, she, along with some of their daughters, continued to be on the payroll.

Many other educated, literary women helped out to various degrees with slip-sorting, proof-reading, sub-editing, reading for, and promoting the OED during this period. Among these were the writer, Harriet Martineau, the novelists Charlotte Yonge and Hilda May Poynter, and the historian Edith Perronet Thompson and her sister Elizabeth, who between them supplied over fifteen thousand quotations. In fact, as K. M. Elisabeth Murray argued in Caught in the Web of Words, the lack of other intellectual and scholarly opportunities available to intelligent women at the time made the response of women to the Dictionary 'particularly warm'.

Staff photographs from a later period show many more female faces, as more women entered the workforce. Often, in fact, there are more women than men in the pictures taken during work on the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1960s and 1970s, and on the OED3 staff, women outnumber men by roughly two to one. Women currently head four of the six main editorial groups, leading the two groups working on general revision, the science group, and the bibliography group, with men running the etymology and new words groups. The position of Director, Editorial Projects, is also held by a woman, Penny Silva:

'I attended Rhodes University, where I was taught by the pre-eminent South African English lexicographers William and Jean Branford. As a new graduate I became one of the first full-time editors in the Dictionary Unit for South African English at Rhodes University, working on the early entries for the large Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. In 1989, after four children and a variety of short-term jobs, I returned as Director of the Unit, and saw the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles through to publication (OUP, 1996), with a lot of advice and assistance from the OED. In 1995 I spent ten weeks in the OED Department, working on the South African vocabulary and leaving notes for future editing. Little did I imagine then that in 1998, just after Christmas, my family and I would take the huge step of moving to England, when I was appointed to the OED revision project as Deputy Chief Editor. In 2001 I became Director of the OED department, and Director, Editorial Projects in 2005.'

Women are also taking a leading role in the non-editorial work associated with the Dictionary. Yvonne Warburton is currently in charge of OED Online:

'I started work as a library researcher on Volume III of the Supplement in 1976, based in the Bodleian Library, checking quotations and searching for information and antedatings. Four years later I was moved 'in-house' to learn how to draft entries, and eventually progressed to revising other people's entries. As the Supplement drew to an end in the 1980s, I transferred to the ambitious project to rekey the OED into an electronic database, organizing an army of freelance proofreaders to check the data. After that, having learned about structured text, I helped produce the first OED on CD-ROM. When the revision project began, I did a spell running the Bibliography Group, but soon did another sideways move in the late 90s, when the concept of OED Online began to emerge. I now manage the online publication, an absorbing job that has taught me an immense amount, and has taken me all over the United States. More than I could have imagined when I saw that ad in the TLS back in 1976 and began work in the dusty library stacks; but I still retain a sneaking fondness for checking the odd Shakespeare quotation that comes my way!'

Yvonne's 'army of freelance proofreaders' included Veronica Hurst, now her successor as head of the Bibliography Group:

'I saw an advertisement in the University Gazette in the early 1980s, inviting proofreaders to apply to Ms. Warburton for work on the Dictionary. Having worked at home on OED proofs for a while, I became part of the in-house team checking other proofreaders' work. Over the months I grew more aware of the way quotations underpinned the whole structure of the dictionary, and began to realize that electronic searching of these sources would have long-term significance for users of the OED. At this point (in 1989–90) OED's bibliographical citations began to exert their own long-term significance in my working life; my realization of the need to rationalize them chimed with the aims of the project at the time, and I began to work on standardization to improve search results for the OED on CD-ROM and to supply an accurate date and authorized style for citations.

'From there I moved to the Bibliography Group. I am now Principal Bibliographer within the 60-strong editorial team at OED, with a group of nine staff and more than twenty-five researchers of various kinds. We are busy learning to use the database we have looked forward to acquiring since the early 1990s, and deciding bibliographical policy and practice for the Dictionary's future—but happily it's still part of my job to check the accuracy of bibliographical citations, authorize styles, and contribute to the improvement of the three million-plus quotations in OED.'

Just as women have always worked on the OED, they have always been quoted in it. In the NED, many female authors were cited as, for instance, 'Miss Stone', 'Mrs. Browning', 'Miss Braddon', 'Mrs. Carlyle', and 'Mrs. Radcliffe'. In subsequent revisions this form is no longer used, and in the vast majority of cases female authors are cited in exactly the same way as male writers: that is, by initial(s) and surname. The exceptions, as with male authors, are the cases in which the author has a particular title (such as Countess) by which they might be more easily recognised. Thus we cite Mary Sidney as the Countess of Pembroke, and Robert Boyle as Lord Orrery for those publications issued after he assumed that title.

Lexicographers are often not aware whether the author of a potential quotation is a man or a woman, as when quoting from many academic journals, newspapers, and magazines, and from anonymous works. This makes it impossible to assess exactly how many quotations in the OED are written by women, but it is inevitable that the general bias that has always existed in the publishing industry towards male writers is reflected in the Dictionary. The number of quotations by women can only be increased by the existence of the OED's reading programmes, which seek out material that is less easily available to editors, and are dedicated to increasing the coverage of areas that may have been neglected in the past, including writing by women. In addition to this, there are now many scholarly corpora of women's writing available to editors online.

In addition to including quotations from many works written by women, the OED's representation of works written for women before the twentieth century has also been improved considerably by the availability of substantial electronic databases containing multiple issues of nineteenth-century periodicals aimed at women such as the Ladies' Pocket Magazine, the Young Ladies' Journal, the Ladies' Repository, which provides first quotations for one hundred and twenty-four words and senses, including: birthday cake, marriageability, minestrone, narcotizing, pericardial fluid, photoheliographic, and piano-playing. Some of these quotations are already published online, others appear in entries still under revision.

The OED still takes quotations from published material which has been specifically marketed at women, including the well-known women's fashion and 'lifestyle' magazines, which represent a valuable source for popular culture and modern life in general. Elle, for instance, has supplied quotations used as examples for approximately sixty headwords, such as: chic, dramedy, high-street, bootylicious, Hinglish, indie, majorly, Medusa-like, omega-6, party spirit, texting, and try-hard. Although Elle has as yet provided us with no first quotations, Vogue has thirty-five, including: beautiful people, blusher, cellulite, launderette, low-impact [aerobics], miniskirt, peep-toe, talc [=talcum powder], and upswept [hair].

Just as the increase in the number of women working for the Dictionary has followed the increase in women in the workplace in general, the quotations in the OED reflect society. The OED seeks to represent usage, rather than be prescriptive about what should or should not be the case. Therefore, if more women write and are published, more women will be quoted. This is also the case with other groups of the population who have been under-represented in the past, and it is an ongoing aim of the OED revision to be as fair a representation of the whole community of English-speakers as we can possibly be.