The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which began publication in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, and provides ongoing descriptions of English language usage in its variations around the world.
Work began on the dictionary in 1857, although publication did not commence until 1884. The work then began to be issued incrementally in unbound fascicles (instalments), as work continued on other parts of the project. The original title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. 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 10 bound volumes.
In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes.
Historical nature
As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use. Following each definition are several brief illustrating quotations presented in chronological order from the earliest ascertainable use of the word in that sense to the last ascertainable use for an obsolete sense, to indicate both its life span and the time since its desuetude, or to a relatively recent use for current ones.
The format of the OEDs 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.
Entries and relative size
thumb|right|Diagram of the types of English vocabulary included in the OED, devised by [[James Murray (lexicographer)|James Murray, its first editor|class=skin-invert-image]]
the Oxford English Dictionary contained 520,779 entries, 888,251 meanings, 3,927,862 quotations, and 821,712 thesaurus entries. 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 580 senses (430 for the bare verb, the rest in phrasal verbs and idioms). As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the record was progressively broken by the verbs make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011 with 645 senses.
Despite its considerable size, the OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers' 33-volume dictionary of the German language, Deutsches Wörterbuch, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612; the first edition of dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish is the (produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy), and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi Dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716. The largest dictionary by number of pages is believed to be the Dutch . By number of definitions the online dictionary Wiktionary has the most, with 1,680,897 English definitions and 11,361,634 total definitions across all languages
History
{| class="wikitable collapsible" style="text-align:center; float:right; clear:right; margin-left:1em;"
|-
! colspan="4" | Oxford English Dictionary Publications
|-
! scope="col" | Publication<br />date
! scope="col" | Volume<br />range
! scope="col" | Title
! scope="col" | Volume
|-
|1888||A and B||A New ED||Vol. 1
|-
|1893||C||NED||Vol. 2
|-
|1897||D and E||NED||Vol. 3
|-
|1900||F and G||NED||Vol. 4
|-
|1901||H to K||NED||Vol. 5
|-
|1908||L to N||NED||Vol. 6
|-
|1909||O and P||NED||Vol. 7
|-
|1914||Q to Sh||NED||Vol. 8
|-
|1919||Si to St||NED||Vol. 9/1
|-
|1919||Su to Th||NED||Vol. 9/2
|-
|1926||Ti to U||NED||Vol. 10/1
|-
|1928||V to Z||NED||Vol. 10/2
|-
|1928||All||NED||10 vols.
|-
|1933||All||NED||Suppl.
|-
|1933||All||Oxford ED||13 vols.
|-
|1972||A to G||OED Sup.||Vol. 1
|-
|1976||H to N||OED Sup.||Vol. 2
|-
|1982||O to Sa||OED Sup.||Vol. 3
|-
|1986||Se to Z||OED Sup.||Vol. 4
|-
|1989||All||OED 2nd Ed.||20 vols.
|-
|1993||All||OED Add. Ser.||Vols. 1–2
|-
|1997||All||OED Add. Ser.||Vol. 3
|}
Origins
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.
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.
thumb|[[Frederick James Furnivall|Frederick Furnivall, 1825–1910]]
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 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. Murray had American philologist and liberal arts college professor Francis March manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium and, by 1880, there were 2,500,000.
The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work unless editorial arrangements were revised. Accordingly, new assistants were hired, and two new demands were made on Murray.
In 1919–1920, J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED, researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range; later he parodied the principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story Farmer Giles of Ham.
By early 1894, a total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A–B, five for C, and two for E. William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed dictionary, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is the most-quoted female writer. Collectively, the Bible is the most-quoted work (in many translations); the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi.
Additional material for a given letter range continued to be gathered after the corresponding fascicle was printed, with a view towards inclusion in a supplement or revised edition. A one-volume supplement of such material was published in 1933, with entries weighted towards the start of the alphabet where the fascicles were decades old. many words and senses newly coined (famously appendicitis, coined in 1886 and missing from the 1885 fascicle, which came to prominence when Edward VII's 1902 appendicitis postponed his coronation); and some previously excluded as too obscure (notoriously radium, omitted in 1903, months before its discoverers Pierre and Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics). Also in 1933 the original fascicles of the entire dictionary were re-issued, bound into 12 volumes, under the title "The Oxford English Dictionary". This edition of 13 volumes including the supplement was subsequently reprinted in 1961 and 1970.
A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary
In 1933, Oxford had finally put the dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However, the English language continued to change and, by 20 years later, the dictionary was outdated. Charles Talbut Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four volumes, starting with A, H, O, and Se. They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement.
Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language and, through the supplement, the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield said that he broadened the scope to include developments of the language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom, including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. Burchfield also removed, for unknown reasons, many entries that had been added to the 1933 supplement. In 2012, an analysis by lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie revealed that many of these entries were foreign loan words, despite Burchfield's claim that he included more such words. The proportion was estimated from a sample calculation to amount to 17% of the foreign loan words and words from regional forms of English. Some of these had only a single recorded usage, but many had multiple recorded citations, and it ran against what was thought to be the established OED editorial practice and a perception that he had opened up the dictionary to "World English".