130-449: Lexico was a dictionary website that provided a collection of English and Spanish dictionaries produced by Oxford University Press (OUP), the publishing house of the University of Oxford . While the dictionary content on Lexico came from OUP, this website was operated by Dictionary.com , whose eponymous website hosts dictionaries by other publishers such as Random House . The website
260-589: 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
390-660: A 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo , Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary , led by Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet ; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation . Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM ;
520-479: A Music Department. At the time, such musical publishing enterprises, however, were rare. and few of the Delegates or former Publishers were themselves musical or had extensive music backgrounds. OUP bought an Anglo-French Music Company and all its facilities, connections, and resources. This concentration provided OUP two mutually reinforcing benefits: a niche in music publishing unoccupied by potential competitors and
650-497: A Tomlin order, a damages settlement under which the servants and agents of Oxford University are permanently barred from denigrating Malcolm or Making Names , rendering it the first book in literary history to be afforded such legal protection. The case was reported to have cost Oxford over £500,000. In November 1998, OUP announced the closure, on commercial grounds, of its modern poetry list. Andrew Potter, OUP's director of music, trade paperbacks and Bibles, told The Times that
780-524: A branch of music performance and composition that the English themselves had largely neglected. Hinnells proposes that the early Music Department's "mixture of scholarship and cultural nationalism" in an area of music with largely unknown commercial prospects was driven by its sense of cultural philanthropy (given the press's academic background) and a desire to promote "national music outside the German mainstream." It
910-411: A fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s 6d. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles. Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary was first used. It then appeared only on
1040-595: A fatwa urging the execution of British author Salman Rushdie and of all involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses . Rushdie went into hiding, and an international movement began to boycott book trading with Iran. There was, therefore, outrage when, in April 1989, OUP broke the worldwide embargo and chose to attend the Tehran Book Fair . OUP justified this by saying, "We deliberated about it quite deeply but felt it certainly wasn't in our interests, or Iran's as
1170-490: A fortune through his shares in the business and the acquisition and renovation of the bankrupt paper mill at Wolvercote. Combe showed little interest, however, in producing fine printed work at the press. The best-known text associated with his print shop was the flawed first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , printed by Oxford at the expense of its author Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) in 1865. It took
1300-496: 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
1430-507: A major printer of Bibles, prayer books, and scholarly works. Oxford's chancellor Archbishop William Laud consolidated the legal status of the university's printing in the 1630s and petitioned Charles I for rights that would enable Oxford to compete with the Stationers' Company and the King's Printer . He obtained a succession of royal grants, and Oxford's "Great Charter" in 1636 gave the university
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#17328379205561560-433: 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. Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018. In 1988, the first electronic version of the dictionary was made available, and the online version has been available since 2000. By April 2014, it
1690-461: A one-year subscription to the website's subscription content. The website's English dictionaries incorporated content of the Oxford Dictionary of English , New Oxford American Dictionary , Oxford Thesaurus of English , and Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus . It also provided a Spanish monolingual dictionary and bilingual dictionaries between English and several languages. As of June 2014, it
1820-550: A peculiar way". 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 first dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on
1950-492: A project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline." By 1989, the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the second edition of the OED, or
2080-465: A record of all the core words and meanings in English over more than 1,000 years, from Old English to the present day, and including many obsolete and historical terms. Meanings are ordered chronologically in the OED , according to when they were first recorded in English ;... Oxford University Press Oxford University Press ( OUP ) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford . It
2210-590: A speech in Oxford in which he denounced the closure: "OUP is not merely a business. It is a department of the University of Oxford and has charitable status. It is part of a great university, which the Government supports financially and which exists to develop and transmit our intellectual culture....It is a perennial complaint by the English faculty that the barbarians are at the gate. Indeed they always are. But we don't expect
2340-414: A total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A–B , five for C , and two for E . Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which eventually became a volume break). At this point, it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments; once every three months beginning in 1895 there would be
2470-572: A variety of dictionaries (e.g. Oxford English Dictionary , Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , Compact Oxford English Dictionary , Compact Editions of the Oxford English Dictionary , Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English , Concise Oxford English Dictionary , Oxford Dictionary of Marketing , Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary ) , English as a second or foreign language resources (e.g. Let's Go ), English language exams (e.g. Oxford Test of English and
2600-465: A victory over its oppressors". The Appeal Court judges were highly critical of Oxford's conduct of the affair and the litigation. Lord Justice Mustill declared, "The Press is one of the longest-established publishing houses in the United Kingdom, and no doubt in the world. They must have been aware from the outset that the absence of agreement on the matters in question [the book's print-run and format]
2730-555: A whole, to stay away." The New York Times and The Sunday Times both condemned Oxford's decision. In 1990, in the UK Court of Appeal, author Andrew Malcolm won a landmark legal judgment against Oxford University (Press) for its breach of a contract to publish his philosophical text Making Names . Reporting on the verdict in The Observer , Laurence Marks wrote, "It is the first time in living memory that Grub Street has won such
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#17328379205562860-509: A wide range of medieval scholarship, and also "a history of insects, more perfect than any yet Extant." Generally speaking, the early 18th century marked a lull in the press's expansion. It suffered from the absence of any figure comparable to Fell. The business was rescued by the intervention of a single Delegate, William Blackstone . Disgusted by the chaotic state of the press and antagonized by Vice-Chancellor George Huddesford , Blackstone called for sweeping reforms that would firmly set out
2990-462: A wider readership. Equally, Price moved OUP towards publishing in its own right. The press had ended its relationship with Parker's in 1863 and, in 1870, bought a small London bindery for some Bible work. Macmillan's contract ended in 1880 and was not renewed. By this time, Oxford also had a London warehouse for Bible stock in Paternoster Row , and in 1880, its manager, Henry Frowde (1841–1927),
3120-581: Is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact , and has taken steps to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the publishing industry. These include the publishing of a new series of Oxford Open Journals, including Oxford Open Climate Change , Oxford Open Energy , Oxford Open Immunology , Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health , and Oxford Open Digital Health . Oxford University Press publishes
3250-504: Is an allegory of a university press missing the point, mistaking its prime purpose." In March 1999 The Times Literary Supplement commissioned Andrew Malcolm to write an article under the strapline "Why the present constitution of the OUP cannot work". A decade later, OUP's managing director, Ivon Asquith, reflected on the public relations damage caused by the episode: "If I had foreseen the self-inflicted wound we would suffer I would not have let
3380-601: Is located on Great Clarendon Street , Oxford . Visits must be booked in advance and are led by an archive staff member. Displays include a 19th-century printing press , the OUP buildings, and the printing and history of the Oxford Almanack , Alice in Wonderland and the Oxford English Dictionary . OUP came to be known as "( The ) Clarendon Press " when printing moved from the Sheldonian Theatre to
3510-577: Is overwhelmingly local, and in 2008, it partnered with the university to support scholarships for South Africans studying postgraduate degrees. Operations in South Asia and East and South East Asia were and, in the case of the former, remain significant parts of the company. Today, the North American branch in New York City is primarily a distribution branch to facilitate the sale of Oxford Bibles in
3640-444: 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
3770-467: Is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586. It is the second-oldest university press after Cambridge University Press , which was founded in 1534. It is a department of the University of Oxford. It is governed by a group of 15 academics, the Delegates of the Press, appointed by
3900-482: 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
4030-462: The Los Angeles Times . Time dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest ", and Richard Boston , writing for The Guardian , called it "one of the wonders of the world ". The supplements and their integration into the second edition were a great improvement to the OED as a whole, but it was recognized that most of the entries were still fundamentally unaltered from the first edition. Much of
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4160-570: The Clarendon Building in Broad Street in 1713. The name continued to be used when OUP moved to its present site in Oxford in 1830. The label "Clarendon Press" took on a new meaning when OUP began publishing books through its London office in the early 20th century. To distinguish the two offices, London books were labelled "Oxford University Press" publications, while those from Oxford were labelled "Clarendon Press" books. This labelling ceased in
4290-509: 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. In 1933, Oxford had finally put the dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However,
4420-527: 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
4550-502: The OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers ' dictionary of the German language , begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612;
4680-641: The OED2 adopted the modern International Phonetic Alphabet . Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated . Following page 832 of Volume XX Wave -— Zyxt there's a 143-page separately paginated bibliography, a conflation of the OED 1st edition's published with the 1933 Supplement and that in Volume IV of the Supplement published in 1986. The British quiz show Countdown awarded
4810-399: The OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, but the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, whereas
4940-636: The OED2, was published. The first edition retronymically became the OED1 . The Oxford English Dictionary 2 was printed in 20 volumes. Up to a very late stage, all the volumes of the first edition were started on letter boundaries. For the second edition, there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with A , B.B.C. , Cham , Creel , Dvandva , Follow , Hat , Interval , Look , Moul , Ow , Poise , Quemadero , Rob , Ser , Soot , Su , Thru , Unemancipated , and Wave . The content of
5070-678: The Oxford Placement Test ), bibliographies (e.g., Oxford Bibliographies Online ), miscellaneous series such as Very Short Introductions , and books on Indology , music , classics , literature , history , Bibles , and atlases . Many of these are published under the Oxford Languages brand. Since 2001, Oxford University Press has financially supported the Clarendon bursary , a University of Oxford graduate scholarship scheme. In February 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued
5200-859: The Revised Version of the New Testament in 1881 and playing a key role in setting up the press's first office outside Britain, in New York City in 1896. Price transformed OUP. In 1884, the year he retired as Secretary, the Delegates bought back the last shares in the business. The press was now owned wholly by the university, with its own paper mill, print shop, bindery, and warehouse. Its output had increased to include school books and modern scholarly texts such as James Clerk Maxwell 's A Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism (1873), which proved fundamental to Einstein's thought. Without abandoning its traditions or quality of work, Price began to turn OUP into an alert, modern publisher. In 1879, he also took on
5330-499: The Uyghur population of Xinjiang , a Turkic ethnic group in China . Rhys Blakely, a science correspondent for The Times , reported: "The research has been published online by Oxford University Press (OUP) in a journal that receives financial support from China's Ministry of Justice . The highly unusual deal will raise fears that Oxford risks becoming entangled in human rights abuses against
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5460-542: The World Wide Web and new computer technology in general meant that the processes of researching the dictionary and of publishing new and revised entries could be vastly improved. New text search databases offered vastly more material for the editors of the dictionary to work with, and with publication on the Web as a possibility, the editors could publish revised entries much more quickly and easily than ever before. A new approach
5590-476: The vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street , Oxford, opposite Somerville College , in the inner suburb of Jericho . For
5720-441: The 1850 Royal Commission on the workings of the university and a new Secretary, Bartholomew Price , to shake up the press. Appointed in 1868, Price had already recommended to the university that the press needed an efficient executive officer to exercise "vigilant superintendence" of the business, including its dealings with Alexander Macmillan , who became the publisher for Oxford's printing in 1863 and 1866 helped Price to create
5850-502: The 1920s progressed. In 1928, the press's imprint read 'London, Edinburgh, Glasgow , Leipzig, Toronto, Melbourne, Cape Town , Bombay, Calcutta , Madras and Shanghai'. Not all of these were full-fledged branches: in Leipzig, there was a depot run by H. Bohun Beet, and in Canada and Australia, there were small, functional depots in the cities and an army of educational representatives penetrating
5980-409: The 1970s when the London office of OUP closed. Today, OUP reserves "Clarendon Press" as an imprint for Oxford publications of particular academic importance. OUP as Oxford Journals has also been a major publisher of academic journals , both in the sciences and the humanities; as of 2024 it publishes more than 500 journals on behalf of learned societies around the world. It has been noted as one of
6110-689: The 1970s, OUP was obliged to sell its Mumbai headquarters building, Oxford House. The Bookseller reported that "The case has again raised questions about OUP's status in the UK". In 2003, Joel Rickett of The Bookseller wrote an article in The Guardian describing the resentment of commercial rivals at OUP's tax exemption. Rickett accurately predicted that the funds which would have been paid in tax were "likely to be used to confirm OUP's dominance by buying up other publishers." Between 1989 and 2018, OUP bought out over 70 rival book and journal publishers. In 2007, with
6240-510: The 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman ), which was the basis for a 2019 film, The Professor and the Madman , starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn . During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope. They had pages printed by publishers, but no publication agreement
6370-556: The Clarendon Press series of cheap, elementary school books – perhaps the first time that Oxford used the Clarendon imprint. Under Price, the press began to take on its modern shape. Major new lines of work began. For example, in 1875, the Delegates approved the series Sacred Books of the East under the editorship of Friedrich Max Müller , bringing a vast range of religious thought to
6500-399: The Delegates bought land on Walton Street. Buildings were constructed from plans drawn up by Daniel Robertson and Edward Blore , and the press moved into them in 1830. This site remains the principal office of OUP in the 21st century, at the corner of Walton Street and Great Clarendon Street , northwest of Oxford city centre. The press then entered an era of enormous change. In 1830, it
6630-407: The Delegates' powers and obligations, officially record their deliberations and accounting, and put the print shop on an efficient footing. Nonetheless, Randolph ignored this document, and it was not until Blackstone threatened legal action that changes began. The university had moved to adopt all of Blackstone's reforms by 1760. By the late 18th century, the press had become more focused. In 1825,
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#17328379205566760-427: The English language continued to change and, by the time 20 years had passed, the dictionary was outdated. There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement of perhaps one or two volumes, but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for
6890-559: The Inland Revenue, and a year later, CUP's tax exemption was quietly conceded. OUP's Chief Executive George Richardson followed suit in 1977. OUP's tax exemption was granted in 1978. The decisions were not made public. The issue was only brought to public attention due to press interest in OUP following the poetry list closure controversy. In 1999, the campaigner Andrew Malcolm published his second book, The Remedy , where he alleged that OUP breached its 1978 tax-exemption conditions. This
7020-515: The Materials Collected by The Philological Society ; the 352-page volume, words from A to Ant , cost 12 s 6 d (equivalent to $ 82 in 2023). The total sales were only 4,000 copies. The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work with unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were hired and two new demands were made on Murray. The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford to work full-time on
7150-468: The OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888. In 1896, Bradley moved to Oxford University. Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business concerns – containing costs and speeding production – to the point where the project's collapse seemed likely. Newspapers reported
7280-619: The Oxford Dictionaries API . In the 2000s, OUP allowed access to content of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English on a website called AskOxford.com . In 2010, Oxford Dictionaries Online was launched under oxforddictionaries.com, superseding the dictionary content of AskOxford.com . Buyers of the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English , also published in 2010, were granted
7410-627: The US dictionary became fully available again on Lexico in early 2020. "Lexico" was itself part of the former name of the company Dictionary.com, Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. In March 2020, the remaining Oxford Living Dictionaries websites, which hosted dictionaries made in the Global Languages programme, were closed. A statement from OUP said, "Rather than offering a dictionary website for every digitally under-resourced language, we will facilitate third parties to build products and services that best serve
7540-643: The Uighur community . It will also add to concerns over China's efforts to influence UK academia ." In February, OUP announced that it was carrying out internal investigations into two further studies, based on DNA taken from China's Xibe ethnic minority. On 17 May, The Times reported that Oxford had retracted the two studies, quoting a statement from the OUP: "Earlier this year, we were alerted to concerns regarding two papers in Forensics Sciences Research. Based on
7670-730: The United States, more than 120 typists of the International Computaprint Corporation (now Reed Tech ) started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML . A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under
7800-547: The United States. It also handles marketing of all books of its parent, Macmillan. By the end of 2021, OUP USA had published eighteen Pulitzer Prize–winning books. In July 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic its Bookshop on the High Street closed. On 27 August 2021, OUP closed Oxuniprint, its printing division. The closure will mark the "final chapter" of OUP's centuries-long history of printing. The Oxford University Press Museum
7930-537: The alphabet as before and updating "key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them". With the relaunch of the OED Online website in December 2010, alphabetical revision was abandoned altogether. The revision is expected roughly to double the dictionary in size. Apart from general updates to include information on new words and other changes in
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#17328379205568060-424: The assembled Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford the appellant has had a fair crack of the whip. I certainly do not... Mr Charkin took the decision [to renege on the OUP editor's contract], not because he thought the book was no good - he had never seen it and the reports were favourable - but because he thought it would not sell. Let there be no mistake about it, the failure of this transaction
8190-551: The book by giving him a valueless assurance would be tantamount to an imputation of fraud... It follows that in my judgment when Mr Hardy used the expressions 'commitment' and 'a fair royalty' he did in fact mean what he said; and I venture to think that it would take a lawyer to arrive at any other conclusion. There was therefore an enforceable contract for the publication of Mr Malcolm's book... The Respondents' final statement may be thought unworthy of them." The case ended in July 1992 with
8320-515: The colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX , was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo , in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz , an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in Time as saying "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of
8450-401: 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
8580-539: The dictionary in Chicago, where he was a professor. The fourth editor was Charles Talbut Onions , who compiled the remaining ranges starting in 1914: Su–Sz , Wh–Wo , and X–Z . 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,
8710-459: 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 one especially prolific reader, W. C. Minor , was confined to a mental hospital for (in modern terminology) schizophrenia . Minor
8840-421: The finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having completed E–G , L–M , S–Sh , St , and W–We . By then, two additional editors had been promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing without much trouble. William Craigie started in 1901 and was responsible for N , Q–R , Si–Sq , U–V , and Wo–Wy. The OUP had previously thought London too far from Oxford but, after 1925, Craigie worked on
8970-650: The first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española (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 Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal . The dictionary began as
9100-635: The first edition was not completed until 1928, 13 years after Murray's death, costing around £375,000. This vast financial burden and its implications landed on Price's successors. The next Secretary, Philip Lyttelton Gell , was appointed by the Vice-Chancellor Benjamin Jowett in 1884 but struggled and was finally dismissed in 1897. The Assistant Secretary, Charles Cannan, was instrumental in Gell's removal. Cannan took over with little fuss and even less affection for his predecessor in 1898: "Gell
9230-440: The first university presses to publish an open access journal ( Nucleic Acids Research ), and probably the first to introduce so-called hybrid open access journals , offering "optional open access" to authors, which provides all readers with online access to their paper free of charge. The "Oxford Open" model applies to the majority of their journals. OUP is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association . OUP
9360-605: The following year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors. In 2016, Simpson published his memoir chronicling his years at the OED: The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary – A Memoir (New York: Basic Books). Thus began the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project. In
9490-459: The free-of-charge dictionaries of English and Spanish were moved to Lexico.com , a collaboration between OUP and Dictionary.com , though with the lexicographic content continuing to be written solely by OUP staff. While the offer of the US English dictionary on Oxford Living Dictionaries was terminated upon the migration to Lexico except for words which the UK dictionary did not have entries for,
9620-483: The gatekeepers themselves, the custodians, to be barbarians." Oxford's professor Valentine Cunningham wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement : "Increasingly, (OUP) has behaved largely like a commercial outfit, with pound signs in its eyes and a readiness to dumb down for the sake of popularity and sales....Sacking poets not because they lose money but because they do not make enough of it: it
9750-514: The general reader, but also for schools and universities, under its Three Crowns Books imprint. Its territory includes Botswana , Lesotho , Swaziland , and Namibia , as well as South Africa, the biggest market of the five. OUP Southern Africa is now one of the three biggest educational publishers in South Africa. It focuses on publishing textbooks, dictionaries, atlases, supplementary material for schools, and university textbooks. Its author base
9880-547: The group published the first sample pages; later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis , aged 30. Thereupon Furnivall 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. Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate
10010-522: The harassment, particularly the Saturday Review , and public opinion backed the editors. Gell was fired, and the university reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt that the dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish. Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A–D , H–K , O–P , and T , nearly half
10140-415: 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. In 1857, work first began on the dictionary, though the first edition was not published In until 1884. It began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under
10270-680: The inauguration in June 2005 of the "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application ", or "Pasadena". With this XML -based system, lexicographers can spend less effort on presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. This system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and enabled staff in New York to work directly on the dictionary in the same way as their Oxford-based counterparts. Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage and email submissions of quotations by readers and
10400-422: The information in the dictionary published in 1989 was already decades out of date, though the supplements had made good progress towards incorporating new vocabulary. Yet many definitions contained disproven scientific theories, outdated historical information, and moral values that were no longer widely accepted. Furthermore, the supplements had failed to recognize many words in the existing volumes as obsolete by
10530-505: The information we received, we undertook further investigation and took the decision to retract the papers, in line with industry standard processes." Oxford English Dictionary 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 published its first edition in 1884, traces
10660-526: The intention of producing a third edition from them. The previous supplements appeared in alphabetical instalments, whereas the new series had a full A–Z range of entries within each individual volume, with a complete alphabetical index at the end of all words revised so far, each listed with the volume number which contained the revised entry. However, in the end only three Additions volumes were published this way, two in 1993 and one in 1997, each containing about 3,000 new definitions. The possibilities of
10790-436: 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. 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,
10920-578: 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 in fact foreign loanwords, despite Burchfield's claim that he included more such words. The proportion
11050-488: The language, the third edition brings many other improvements, including changes in formatting and stylistic conventions for easier reading and computerized searching, more etymological information, and a general change of focus away from individual words towards more general coverage of the language as a whole. While the original text drew its quotations mainly from literary sources such as novels, plays, and poetry, with additional material from newspapers and academic journals,
11180-530: The last 400 years, OUP has focused primarily on the publication of pedagogical texts. It continues this tradition today by publishing academic journals, dictionaries, English language resources, bibliographies, books on Indology , music, classics, literature, and history, as well as Bibles and atlases. OUP has offices around the world, primarily in locations that were once part of the British Empire . The University of Oxford began printing around 1480 and became
11310-419: The leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series between its inception in 1982 and Series 63 in 2010. The prize was axed after Series 83, completed in June 2021, due to being considered out of date. When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. Author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century", as quoted by
11440-487: The letter M , with new material appearing every three months on the OED Online website. The editors chose to start the revision project from the middle of the dictionary in order that the overall quality of entries be made more even, since the later entries in the OED1 generally tended to be better than the earlier ones. However, in March 2008, the editors announced that they would alternate each quarter between moving forward in
11570-442: The list "just about breaks even. The university expects us to operate on commercial grounds, especially in this day and age." In the same article, the poet D. J. Enright , who had been with OUP since 1979, said, "There was no warning. It was presented as a fait accompli. Even the poetry editor didn't know....The money involved is peanuts. It's a good list, built up over many years." In February 1999, Arts Minister Alan Howarth made
11700-453: The name of 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
11830-449: The needs of each individual language community. Our efforts will be focused on creating and providing the data that these third parties need." At the time of the closure, they hosted dictionaries of Zulu, Northern Sotho, Malay , Urdu , Tswana , Indonesian , Romanian , Latvian , Swahili , Hindi , Tamil , Gujarati , Tatar , Xhosa , Southern Quechua , Tajik , Tok Pisin , Turkmen , Telugu , and Greek . On 26 August 2022, Lexico
11960-461: The new "public benefit" requirement of the revised Charities Act, the issue was re-examined with particular reference to OUP. In the same year, Malcolm obtained and posted the documents of OUP’s applications to the Inland Revenue for tax exemption in the 1940s and 1950s (unsuccessful) and the 1970s (successful). In 2008, CUP's and OUP's privilege was attacked by rival publishers. In 2009, The Guardian invited Andrew Malcolm to write an article on
12090-488: The new edition will reference more kinds of material that were unavailable to the editors of previous editions, such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters. John Simpson was the first chief editor of the OED3 . He retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt , who is the eighth chief editor of the dictionary. The production of the new edition exploits computer technology, particularly since
12220-434: The outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else. The 125th and last fascicle covered words from Wise to the end of W and was published on 19 April 1928, and the full dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately. William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed dictionary, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
12350-481: The predecessor to Lexico , as follows: The dictionary content in Oxford Dictionaries focuses on current English and includes modern meanings and uses of words. Where words have more than one meaning, the most important and common meanings in modern English are given first, and less common and more specialist or technical uses are listed below. The OED , on the other hand, is a historical dictionary and it forms
12480-699: The project in ten years. Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron outbuilding called the " Scriptorium " which was lined with wooden planks, bookshelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages. For instance, there were ten times as many quotations for abusion as for abuse . He appealed, through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, for readers who would report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in
12610-472: The project, which he did in 1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected in the back garden of his new property. Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling that he would accelerate his work pace with experience. That turned out not to be so, and Philip Gell of
12740-553: The proposal get as far as the Finance Committee." Since the 1940s, both OUP and the Cambridge University Press (CUP), had made applications to the Inland Revenue for exemption from corporate tax. The first application, by CUP in 1940, was rejected "on the ground that, since the Press was printing and publishing for the outside world and not simply for the internal use of the University, the Press's trade went beyond
12870-503: The publication that led that process to its conclusion: the massive project that became the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Offered to Oxford by James Murray and the Philological Society , the "New English Dictionary" was a grand academic and patriotic undertaking. Lengthy negotiations led to a formal contract. Murray was to edit a work estimated to take ten years and to cost approximately £9,000. Both figures were wildly optimistic. The Dictionary began appearing in print in 1884, but
13000-731: 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)
13130-505: The purpose and objects of the University and (in terms of the Act) was not exercised in the course of the actual carrying out of a primary purpose of the University." Similar applications by OUP in 1944 and 1950 were also rejected by the Inland Revenue, whose officers repeatedly pointed out that the university presses were in open competition with commercial, tax-liable publishers. In November 1975, CUP's chief executive Geoffrey Cass again applied to
13260-633: 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. Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic,
13390-606: The right to print "all manner of books". Laud also obtained the "privilege" from the Crown of printing the King James or Authorized Version of Scripture at Oxford. This privilege created substantial returns over the next 250 years. Following the English Civil War , Vice-chancellor John Fell , Dean of Christ Church , Bishop of Oxford , and Secretary to the Delegates was determined to install printing presses in 1668, making it
13520-600: The rural fastnesses to sell the press's stock as well as books published by firms whose agencies were held by the press, very often including fiction and light reading. In India, the Branch depots in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta were imposing establishments with sizable stock inventories, for the Presidencies themselves were large markets, and the educational representatives there dealt mostly with upcountry trade. In 1923, OUP established
13650-399: The second supplement; 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 Sea . They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing
13780-526: The start of the alphabet where the fascicles were decades old. The supplement included at least one word ( bondmaid ) accidentally omitted when its slips were misplaced; 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
13910-596: The subject. In July 2012, the UK's Serious Fraud Office found OUP's branches in Kenya and Tanzania guilty of bribery to obtain school bookselling contracts sponsored by the World Bank. Oxford was fined £1.9 million "in recognition of sums it received which were generated through unlawful conduct" and barred from applying for World Bank-financed projects for three years. In December 2023, concerns were raised that OUP had published an academic paper based on genetic data taken from
14040-494: The time of the second edition's publication, meaning that thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use. Accordingly, it was recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin to rectify these problems. The first attempt to produce a new edition came with the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, a new set of supplements to complement the OED2 with
14170-767: The university's first central print shop. In 1674, OUP began to print a broadsheet calendar, known as the Oxford Almanack , that was produced annually without interruption from 1674 to 2019. Fell drew up the first formal programme for the university's printing, which envisaged hundreds of works, including the Bible in Greek , editions of the Coptic Gospels and works of the Church Fathers , texts in Arabic and Syriac , comprehensive editions of classical philosophy , poetry, and mathematics,
14300-422: The user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset , with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit
14430-466: 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
14560-522: Was a Yale University-trained surgeon and a military officer in the American Civil War who had been confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. He invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. The story of how Murray and Minor worked together to advance the OED was retold in
14690-568: Was about money, not prestige. Nor does the course of the litigation give any reason to suppose that the Press had any interest but to resist the claim, no matter on what grounds, so long as they succeeded." Lord Justice Leggatt added: "It is difficult to know what the Deputy Judge (Lightman) meant by a 'firm commitment' other than an intention to create legal relations. Nothing short of that would have had any value whatever for Mr Malcolm... To suggest that Mr Hardy intended to induce Mr Malcolm to revise
14820-427: Was always here, but I cannot make out what he did." By the early 20th century, OUP expanded its overseas trade, partly due to the efforts of Humphrey Milford , the publisher of the University of Oxford from 1913 to 1945. The 1920s saw skyrocketing prices of both materials and labour. Paper was hard to come by and had to be imported from South America through trading companies. Economies and markets slowly recovered as
14950-419: Was called for, and for this reason it was decided to embark on a new, complete revision of the dictionary. Beginning with the launch of the first OED Online site in 2000, the editors of the dictionary began a major revision project to create a completely revised third edition of the dictionary ( OED3 ), expected to be completed in 2037 at a projected cost of about £ 34 million. Revisions were started at
15080-405: Was closed and redirected to Dictionary.com . Oxford Dictionaries Premium was still available. The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) is a subscription service, while Lexico used the Oxford Dictionaries API to offer more modern versions of the Oxford Dictionary of English and New Oxford American Dictionary to users for free. The OED described its difference from Oxford Dictionaries ,
15210-603: Was closed and redirected to Dictionary.com on 26 August 2022. Before the Lexico site was launched, the Oxford Dictionary of English and New Oxford American Dictionary were hosted by OUP's own website Oxford Dictionaries Online ( ODO ), later known as Oxford Living Dictionaries . The dictionaries' definitions have also appeared in Google definition search and the Dictionary application on macOS , among others, licensed through
15340-431: Was completed, it was clear that the full text of the dictionary would need to be computerized. Achieving this would require retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching—as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this process began in 1983, and editorial work started
15470-409: 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". By the time the new supplement
15600-416: Was given the formal title of Publisher to the university. Frowde came from the book trade, not the university, and remained an enigma to many. One obituary in Oxford's staff magazine The Clarendonian admitted, "Very few of us here in Oxford had any personal knowledge of him." Despite that, Frowde became vital to OUP's growth, adding new lines of books to the business, presiding over the massive publication of
15730-448: 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: 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
15860-687: Was not until 1939 that the Music Department showed its first profitable year. The Depression of 1929 dried profits from the Americas to a trickle, and India became 'the one bright spot' in an otherwise dismal picture. Bombay was the nodal point for distribution to the Africas and onward sale to Australasia, and people who trained at the three major depots later moved to pioneer branches in Africa and Southeast Asia. In 1927–1934 Oxford University Press, Inc., New York,
15990-446: Was not, in the trade, regarded as preventing a formal agreement from coming into existence. Candour would, I believe, have required that this should have been made clear to the judge and ourselves, rather than a determined refusal to let the true position come to light... This is not quite all. I do not know whether an outsider studying the history of this transaction and of this litigation would feel that, in his self-financed struggle with
16120-479: 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,
16250-512: Was reached; both the Cambridge University Press and the Oxford University Press were approached. The OUP finally agreed in 1879 (after two years of negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray) to publish the dictionary and to pay Murray, who was both the editor and the Philological Society president. The dictionary was to be published as interval fascicles, with the final form in four volumes, totalling 6,400 pages. They hoped to finish
16380-485: Was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary is expected to be available exclusively in electronic form; the CEO of OUP has stated that it is unlikely that it will ever be printed. 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
16510-580: Was reorganised by Geoffrey Cumberlege to return it to profitability from the lows of the Depression years. (In 1945–1956, Cumberlege would succeed Milford as publisher to the University of Oxford). The period following World War II saw consolidation in the face of the breakup of the Empire and the post-war reorganization of the Commonwealth. In the 1960s, OUP Southern Africa started publishing local authors for
16640-567: Was reported in a front-page article in The Oxford Times , along with OUP's response. In March 2001, after a 28-year battle with the Indian tax authorities, OUP lost its tax exemption in India. The Supreme Court ruled that OUP was not tax exempt in the subcontinent "because it does not carry out any university activities there but acts simply as a commercial publisher". To pay off back taxes, owed since
16770-501: Was still a joint-stock printing business in an academic backwater, offering learned works to a relatively small readership of scholars and clerics At this time, Thomas Combe joined the press and became the university's Printer until he died in 1872. Combe was a better businessman than most Delegates but still no innovator: he failed to grasp the huge commercial potential of India paper , which grew into one of Oxford's most profitable trade secrets in later years. Even so, Combe earned
16900-438: Was updated every three months. In 2014, OUP launched Oxford Global Languages , an initiative to build lexical resources (bilingual dictionaries) of the world's languages, starting with Zulu and Northern Sotho online dictionaries released in 2015. In 2016, the free content of Oxford Dictionaries Online was rebranded as Oxford Living Dictionaries , and the subscription content as Oxford Dictionaries Premium . In June 2019,
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