THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

The first volume (A to Ant) of the OED

Today, The Grandma wants to talk about the Oxford English Dictionary to commemorate that on a day like today in 1884, the first volume (A to Ant) of the Oxford English Dictionary was published.

If you want to learn a new language, you need to know a lot of vocabulary. Words are the simplest expression of a language and as words as you know, as possibilities of creating new sentences. 

Dictionaries are one of the most useful tools to learn a language and the Oxford English Dictionary is a great reference in English language.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP).

It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world.

The second edition, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, was published in 1989.

Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but it was only in 1884 that it began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society.

More information: Oxford English Dictionary

 
In 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes.

In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as twelve volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published. Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which is complete as of 2018.

The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary will most likely only appear in electronic form; the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely that it will ever be printed.

More information: BBC

As a historical dictionary, The Oxford English Dictionary explains words by showing their development rather than merely their present-day usages. Therefore, it shows definitions in the order that the sense of the word began being used, including word meanings which are no longer used.

Each definition is shown with numerous short usage quotations; in each case, the first quotation shows the first recorded instance of the word that the editors are aware of and, in the case of words and senses no longer in current usage, the last quotation is the last known recorded usage. This allows the reader to get an approximate sense of the time period in which a particular word has been in use, and additional quotations help the reader to ascertain information about how the word is used in context, beyond any explanation that the dictionary editors can provide.

The Oxford English Dictionary

The format of the OED's entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects. The forerunners to the OED, such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, had initially provided few quotations from a limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications.

This influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works. According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to key in the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, and 540 megabytes to store them electronically. As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries.

Supplementing the entry headwords, there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations; 249,300 etymologies; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations.

The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (second edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011.

More information: History Today

The dictionary began as a Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London and unconnected to Oxford University, Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall, who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries.

The Society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844, but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an Unregistered Words Committee to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries.

In November, Trench's report was not a list of unregistered words; instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:

-Incomplete coverage of obsolete words

-Inconsistent coverage of families of related words

-Incorrect dates for earliest use of words

-History of obsolete senses of words often omitted

-Inadequate distinction among synonyms

-Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations

-Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.

James Murray in 1879

The Society ultimately realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to a larger project. Trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed.

On 7 January 1858, the Society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary. Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. Later the same year, the Society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED).

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) played the key role in the project's first months, but his appointment as Dean of Westminster meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time that it required. He withdrew and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor.

More information: Washington Examiner

On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published and research was started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54 pigeon-hole grid. In April 1861, the group published the first sample pages; later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis, aged 30.

Frederick James Furnivall thence became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but temperamentally ill-suited for the work. Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project, as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips were misplaced.

More information: Mental Floss

Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate the quotations that the dictionary needed. As a result, he founded the Early English Text Society in 1864 and the Chaucer Society in 1868 to publish old manuscripts.

Furnivall's preparatory efforts lasted 21 years and provided numerous texts for the use and enjoyment of the general public, as well as crucial sources for lexicographers, but they did not actually involve compiling a dictionary. 

The Oxford Classical Dictionary

Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic, the volunteers were not well trained and often made inconsistent and arbitrary selections. Ultimately, Furnivall handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor.

In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached James Murray, who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing the dictionary.

In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year. 20 years after its conception, the dictionary project finally had a publisher. It would take another 50 years to complete.

Late in his editorship, Murray learned that a prolific reader named W. C. Minor was a criminal lunatic. Minor was a Yale University-trained surgeon and military officer in the American Civil War, and was confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. Minor invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests.

British prime minister Stanley Baldwin described the OED as a national treasure. Author Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org, has called it a lex icon. Tim Bray, co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the developing inspiration of that markup language.

More information: All That's Interesting

However, despite, and at the same time precisely because of, its claims of authority, the dictionary has been criticised since at least the 1960s from various angles. It has become a target precisely because of its scope, its claims to authority, its British-centredness and relative neglect of World Englishes, its implied but not acknowledged focus on literary language and, above all, its influence.

The OED, as a commercial product, has always had to manoeuvre a thin line between PR, marketing and scholarship and one can argue that its biggest problem is the critical uptake of the work by the interested public.

More information: The Guardian

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper;

the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,'

has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace,

where it has doubled in size and grown

more timely and usable than ever.

James Gleick