March 2006 Newsletter

This issue of OED News continues the theme of the last one, focusing again on the contribution that women have made to the Oxford English Dictionary. Beverley Hunt writes about the work of the Thompson sisters on the first edition of the OED. She examines some of their extensive correspondence with its editors, particularly James Murray and Charles Onions, much of which survives in the Dictionary’s archives.

The archives are also home to many pamphlets containing past appeals for help from the general public in researching particular OED entries. This issue takes a look at some of those old appeals, and also at the successes of the Dictionary’s more recent appeals—the list which appears regularly in OED News every quarter, and the one-off list produced for the recent BBC Wordhunt, which culminated in the successful six-part television series, ‘Balderdash and Piffle’, screened on BBC2 earlier this year.

This newsletter is available to download. (To view the file you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader.)