Abstract
This paper argues that voluntary readers for OED1 made citations from minor literary works in accordance with stereotypes about their language and content. They are, consequently, less well-represented in the dictionary than writers of higher literary status. The use of electronic databases in the OED3 revision process will tend to reduce these works’ existing coverage by antedating first citations from them, and by selecting citations from among a wider range of possible sources. While unusual uses in Shakespeare will not be removed as part of this revision process, it is highly unlikely that the nonce forms of less canonical authors will be inserted. In this way, the current revision process perpetuates the literary prejudices of the first edition.
Highlights
This paper builds on the work of many scholars who have demonstrated that the coverage of individual works and authors in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is shaped by their literary status
Bunyan was a popular writer whose style was seen as both unpolished and linguistically conservative and while OED readers appear to have considered him a useful provider of citations for dialect and religious terms, they did not make extensive use of his works for evidence of normal words being used in the usual ways
As a more experienced contributor, Paine largely indexed normal usages in his reading of Bunyan, but these were largely superfluous because other authors had already provided citations from earlier in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. These processes combined in the production of the OED to marginalize Bunyan into conformity with his stereotype
Summary
This paper builds on the work of many scholars who have demonstrated that the coverage of individual works and authors in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is shaped by their literary status (see, for example, Schäfer 1980). If additional citations and related forms and senses are viewed as supplementary evidence of use or as additional arguments for including these terms, the only word cited solely on Bunyan’s authority is superstitiate.
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