Embedded Files
Much of the material in this web page, including the illustrations, comes from Gilliver's The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The publication of the complete OED in 1928 was followed with the publication of the Supplement in 1933. Both Craigie and Onions moved on to other projects, and the 1933 reissue with the supplement was the last significant editorial step taken for twenty years. The files were retained by the Press, and both of the editors maintained personal files of added data. Work on other dictionary projects, both in English and in other languages, continued. An important contributor, James Wyllie, was editor of the Oxford Latin
Dictionary project, but worked to keep up the data that might be used in a future revision of the OED. Gilliver suggested that it was important to support the the "general impression that Oxford is still an active lexicosgraphical 'machine' " (p. 421) even though no revision was planned. During World War II Craigie maintained and expanded a body of material that could support a revision of the 1933 supplement, now rapidly becoming dated. In the first few postwar years saw the emphasis was on updating the profitable shorter dictionaries. By 1951 calls from the very elderly Craigie and Onions that the OED very much needed a new supplement began to be listened to, in part because the Press realized that the OED was the crucial background for all of their dictionary projects.
In 1953 the Oxford Press decided it was time to produce a new supplement, ready, they hoped, to be published alongside a reprinting of the 1933 edition, which they thought would be needed around 1960. After a long search in 1957 they hired a medievalist to head up their dictionary department,
The court battle about the unexpurgaged Lady Chatterly's Lover in 1959 led to a complicated discussion of four-letter words in the Supplement that hearkened back to Victorian attitudes. The two most contentious words did, finally, appear under C and F.
Robert Burchfield (1923-2004) started from scratch. He was not trained as a lexicographer and had only a few surviving veterans to help him train . He faced many of the same practical and theoretical problems Murray and his colleagues had dealt with almost 80 years before, and succeeded, like them, long after the schedule he had hoped to reach. He initiated a reading program, developed procedures, and finally began to prepare text for the printer in 1963. The four volumes of the Supplement appeared between 1972 and 1984. Instead of a single 1,300-page volume, the Supplement was 57,730 pages, with 69,300 entires.
Reactions were generally very positive, although a former staff member, the novelist Julian Barnes, pointed out some errors and omissions in the midst of his praise, and said, "when there are blackheads on the brow of Nefertiti, we shouldn't pretend they are beauty-spots" (qtd in Gilliver, p. 525). The somewhat argumentative Burchfield tended to defend the project against all critics.
As the benefits of computer technology began to attract attention in Oxford, Burchfield stepped back and the publication in 1989 of a second edition of the OED was officially overseen by two new editors. Edmund Weiner and John Simpson (Weiner later decided he preferred lexicographical work to administration).
In 1982 a project to digitize the text of the dictionary was explored. The state of optical character recognition and the typographical complexity of the OED meant that the text would need to be manually entered. In 1983 and 1984 a "New OED Project" was begun, involving a partnership with IBM, the University of Waterloo (Ontario) Computer Science Department, and the International Computaprint Corporation of Pennsylvania:
See the sub page Computer Codes for a larger photo of this and the later pages of code
The scale of the new project was undeniably impressive. In order to create an electronic database containing the integrated text of the OED and Supplement— from which it was also planned to produce a printed version of the text—350 million characters would need to be keyed and proofread, with additional markup added to the text in order to represent the structure of the entries; the machine-readable text, with its tagging, would then need to be transformed by means of specially written software into a searchable database; and material from the Supplement was to be integrated into the main body of the Dictionary, a complex task requiring a mixture of computational and manual methods. The resulting text would then be typeset and printed. This formidable combination of tasks, described as ‘Phase 1’, was expected to take four years. ‘Phase 2’ was more open-ended, but its goals
included the publication of the Dictionary in electronic form, and the ongoing revision, updating, and enhancement of the text. (It is worth pointing out that publication of a printed version of the integrated text had not formed part of the initial concept at all, although it rapidly became an important goal, both because of the much-needed revenue that would result—Edmund Weiner later referred to it as ‘absolutely necessary to the economic viability of the New OED project as a whole’—and also simply because of the need, in the uncharted and unbounded territory that computerization and revision of the Dictionary represented, for an interim objective that could readily be conceived and planned for.) In order to achieve the first phase, and make the necessary preparations for the second, OUP was now entering into a four-way partnership with IBM UK, ICC, and the University of Waterloo: ICC would undertake the keying of the text, IBM would contribute hardware, software, and personnel to assist with the creation of the database, and the University of Waterloo would conduct research into the electronic handling of large text databases (using the OED data as raw material) and make available any software which resulted from this work.
Gilliver (pp. 529-530).
Keying of the text of the 1933 text and the completed supplement volumes involved 120 or so keyboarders working in Pennsylvania and Florida—and, of course, copy-readers in Oxford.
The keyboarding of the entire text of the OED and Supplement was completed in late June [1986], and the equally formidable task of proofreading the keyed text was completed very soon afterwards. By late September work could begin on the further processing—computational and human—that would be necessary in order to transform the database into the version that was to be published, in paper form, in 1989.
This version of the Dictionary had already begun to be referred to informally as the second edition. This would become a controversial designation, for some, of a text which it had been accepted would not be subjected to full-scale revision; but it was already clear that the version of the Dictionary that was to be issued in 1989 would differ in several significant respects from what had been published previously, and that revision of the Dictionary had already begun.
Gilliver (p. 537)
[T]he computerization of the Dictionary was continuing to make impressive progress. Automatic processing of the keyed text, including the integration of first edition and Supplement material to the extent that this was possible without human intervention, was completed by the end of May 1987; a month later the bespoke editing software that would be needed for the next stage—an adaptation of a lexicographical text editing system called LEXX (see illustration above and subpage), developed by the IBM computer scientist Mike Cowlishaw—was ready for use (and had already been christened OEDIPUS, the ‘OED Integration, Publishing, and Updating System’, by Veronica Hurst, a freelance assistant working on the New OED project), and the editing of fully integrated entries could begin. By August the first sections of integrated text were ready to be sent to a typesetting company, Filmtype Services of Scarborough, to be converted into a form from which printed as opposed to machine-readable entries could be produced; the resulting galleys and page proofs were now dealt with by a new team of proofreaders. Simpson and Weiner jointly undertook to read page proofs for the entire 59-millionword text: a mammoth task which has been compared to their both reading the Bible from cover to cover every week for a year. Seeing the whole Dictionary in proof also gave them a thorough knowledge of the whole text in a way that nothing else could have done. . . .
Most of the processing of the text had to be carried out repeatedly on each of forty separate alphabetical ranges or ‘tables’; magnetic tapes of data from tables on which integration had already been completed were sent off to Scarborough even as the work of integrating the text in other parts of the alphabet was still going on, thereby introducing a further element of complexity to the task of coordinating all of the different stages of work. Proofreading and integration continued in parallel until the latter task was completed in June 1988. Once proofreading of a range of text was complete, camera-ready copy for printing could be produced; film for printing the 21,730 pages of the second edition then had to be sent to the selected manufacturer, Rand McNally of Taunton, Massachusetts (not OUP’s own struggling printing department, for whom the awarding of this job to an external printer was a bitter blow). The division of this material into twenty volumes took place at a relatively late stage in the process.
Gilliver, Peter (p. 540-542).
The quotation slips were still on paper, and growing "at a rate of something like 10,000 quotations a month" (Gilliver, p. 543). The need to computerize the records as well as the texts to be printed became pressing, largelly because of the idea that a corpus of data would aid all of the Oxford dictionary projects. That project was smaller than the next step—revising and developing the integrated texts of the first edition and supplement, now in print as well as electronic form. The official publication date of the OED 2 was March 29, 1989 .
Below see the revised program for entries (larger photo on subpage)
Burchfield's hesitancy about computers led him to step back from the editorship, leaving Simpson and Weiner to be the faces of the new edition—their hard work developing the computer systems and their epic proofreading mentioned above meant that their credit was far from undeserved, although Burchfield's self-taught lexicographical skills had restored the moribund OED project to health. The 20-volume set was a very lightly revised version of the 1933 edition integrated with Burchfield's four Supplement volumes.
By the mid-1990's work was underway on an online third edition, although revisions of entries is ongoing to the present. There was no longer the need to work exclusively by alphabetical order. Improvements could be entered as they were developed. In an echo of the fascicle publications of the first edition, now new entries and revised versions of prior entries are now posted quarterly, as in this example from March 2023;
March 2023 Update
March 2023 Update
The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary includes over 1,400 fully revised and updated entries, and over 700 new words, phrases, and senses appear for the first time, including deepfake, antigram, and groomzilla.
Learn more about the words added to the OED this quarter in our new words notes by OED Executive Editor, Craig Leyland.
Discover the biblical origins of VIRAGO in this post by Eleanor Maier, OED Executive Editor.
Take a look at the additions to New Zealand English in this blog post by Danica Salazar, OED Executive Editor. Also be sure to have a read of OED Senior Consultant Phonetics Editor, Matthew Moreland's blog on the New Zealand Transcription Model.
Finally, ever wondered about the history of the word GROOM? Matthew Bladen, OED Senior Editor, delves into it here.
You can see the full list of words to be added in this update here.
On March 13, 2000 James Murray's five-year-old great great great grandson, with some help from Simpson, was the first user of the online OED. (Gilliver, p. 569)
Twenty-four years after the publication of the Second Edition, here are Weiner and the head of Oxford Dictionaries, a large and profitable arm of the Oxsford Press, watching Simpson cut the cake at his retirement celebration—with a spectral onlooker in the backgroound.
If the online OED is not to your taste, here are printed alternatives, with the prices listed last week in the OUP Web Site:
The Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes): $1,215.00
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes in one—what we saw today): $490.00
The Shorter Oxford English DIctionary: $170.00
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary: $39.95
The P:ocket Oxford English Dictionary: $18.95
The LIttle Oxford Dictionary: $14.95
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