The OED and Collaborative Research into the History of English

Abstract

The Oxford English Dictionary (originally published between 1884 and 1928) is currently undergoing its first comprehensive revision and updating. The Third Edition of the Dictionary is now being published online in quarterly instalments, the first of which appeared in March 2000. Since then, three different streams of material have emerged: a full alphabetical sequence of entries (beginning with the letter M) which revise and update the standing text of the Dictionary; entries and subsenses from throughout the alphabet which are entirely new to the Dictionary; and amendments to the newly revised entries, based on information which has entered the Dictionary’s files since online publication. The revised edition benefits from the work of many historical and other dictionaries published since the First Edition of the OED, and examples are provided in this article of typical improvements stemming from such sources. Examples are also given of new information collected from a range of other sources, including the OED itself (as a historical database), online historical textbases, the Dictionary’s own reading programme of primary and secondary sources, and the contributions of individual scholars. The Dictionary relies to a great extent on the generous collaborative contributions of scholars working in specialist fields, and the article calls on such scholars to continue to send the results of their research to the editors of the OED. The article ends with a detailed critical comparison of the revised and updated version of an entry (naiad) with the equivalent entry as previously published in the Dictionary.