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92-575: 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 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

184-586: 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

276-415: A computerized corpus. Most recent historical dictionaries and historical dictionary revision projects have been based on a mixture of quotations taken down by hand and texts from corpora. Because of their size and scope, the compilation of historical dictionaries takes significantly longer than the compilation of general dictionaries. This is often exacerbated by the scholarly nature and limited audience for

368-407: 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

460-541: A greater number of abstract nouns than the first edition, and provided an improved approach to article structure, avoiding clumsy or inconvenient cross-references. The third edition was published in three volumes in Florence itself in 1691. It tried to take into account some of the criticisms levelled against the first edition. The fourth edition came out in Florence in six volumes between 1729 and 1738, edited by Domenico Maria Manni . The range of writers used as references

552-669: A historical dictionary are: However, not all dictionaries which are called 'historical' have all of these features. For example, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary includes only minimal quotations, with most entries having only an approximate date of first use, and the Webster's New International Dictionary (which, though it does not market itself as historical, is founded on historical principles ) features only dates of first use and does not order its senses chronologically. For some languages, like Sanskrit and Greek ,

644-485: A large number of readers to read and excerpt from historical texts into individual pieces of paper, which were then collated into alphabetical order and referred to during the compilation of the relevant entry. The Oxford English Dictionary , for example, established a reading programme at its foundation which continues to this day. The advent of computerized full-text search databases and techniques means that lexicographers can now make use of corpora of documents to gain

736-492: 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

828-552: A lengthy discussion started among the academicians as to whether a different title should be used. Failing to reach unanimity on this, they eventually adopted the neutral title Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca along with the subtitle As derived from the writers and usage of the city of Florence . The original title was retained however on the licence to print granted by the Republic of Venice in January 1611. The editio princeps

920-506: 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 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,

1012-460: A more balanced view of the history of a particular word or phrase, as well as finding new quotation material to fill gaps in the history of some words; some lexicographers have noted, however, that electronic search is not a complete replacement for manual quotation-gathering, among other things because though it can help finding examples of a word already known to exist, full-text search is less good at identifying which words need to be researched in

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1104-547: 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

1196-507: 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 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

1288-798: A single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the second edition of the OED, or 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

1380-591: A standard form: the definitions of concrete nouns consist of a single synonym , while abstract nouns have a larger number; homonyms from different parts are labelled as such, and participle forms are included in the entry for their infinitives unless there is a clear reason for placing them separately. Despite criticisms of the archaic Tuscan dialect, the Vocabolario became widely established both in Italy and abroad; its superiority over earlier lexicons lay primarily in

1472-477: 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 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

1564-413: 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

1656-627: Is intended to be a complete historical dictionary of classical Latin. The International Union of Academies undertook in 1924 to compile a series of national dictionaries of Latin in each of its member academies; for instance, the British Academy produced the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources . The Svenska Akademiens ordbok (Dictionary of the Swedish Academy) is a multivolume historical dictionary (also available online) which

1748-639: Is nearing completion. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca The Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca was the first dictionary of the Italian language , published in 1612 by the Accademia della Crusca . It was also only the second dictionary of a modern European language, being just one year later than the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias in Spain in 1611. In 1583

1840-481: 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

1932-529: 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 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

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2024-475: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles , and the Australian National Dictionary . Uniquely, from the 1960s to the 2000s, a historical thesaurus was produced for English, which inverts the traditional historical dictionary by showing the development of concepts into words, rather than the development of words to describe different concepts. The Historical Thesaurus of English

2116-459: 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

2208-554: The Accademia della Crusca was founded in Florence with the aim of codifying the Tuscan dialect and producing a comprehensive dictionary, drawing mainly on the lexicon of canonical literary texts from Florentine authors of the 'golden age' in the fourteenth century, such as Dante , Petrarca and Boccaccio . Work on the Vocabolario was begun in 1591 thanks to Lionardo Salviati 's interest in philology . His search for words extended beyond

2300-624: 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

2392-507: 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,

2484-551: 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;

2576-417: 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 the OED2 adopted

2668-441: 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)

2760-541: 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

2852-464: 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 was reached; both

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2944-515: 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 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

3036-566: The English Language (1755) included quotations from admired writers as well as some words that were obsolete or obsolescent by the mid 18th century. Modern historical principles emerged with the publication of John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808). Like modern historical dictionaries, Jamieson attempted to find the earliest use of each word, and printed quotations in chronological order demonstrating

3128-426: 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

3220-509: 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

3312-786: 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 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

3404-513: 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

3496-588: 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 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

3588-533: 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

3680-610: 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 ; 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

3772-588: The changes which had occurred to that word throughout history. In 1812 the German classicist Franz Passow laid out his plan for a comprehensive dictionary of the Greek language which would 'set out [...] the life story of each single word in a conveniently ordered overviews', which was completed as the Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache in 1824. This idea was transmitted to the English-speaking world through

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3864-510: The courts, legal documents and private correspondence. In addition it announced the establishment of an annual prize of 500 napoleoni to authors whose works best contributed to maintaining the Italian language in all its purity. A further decree on 9 January 1811 re-established the Accademia della Crusca and charged it specifically with revising the dictionary as well as with preserving the purity of

3956-414: 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. Since 2000, compilation of

4048-533: 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,

4140-504: 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 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

4232-455: 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

4324-523: 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 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

4416-419: 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

4508-647: 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

4600-528: The first place. The Oxford English Dictionary is the largest and most popular historical dictionary of the English language, with an aim to cover all words which saw some significant use at any time between the early Middle English period and the present day. The earlier history of English is covered in more detail by the Middle English Dictionary (1954–2001) and the Dictionary of Old English (1986–present). Despite efforts made at time of

4692-616: 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

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4784-707: The founding of the Middle English Dictionary project to produce a dictionary of Early Modern English , this never came to fruition. Several historical dictionaries exist which cover the dialects and regionalisms particular to certain geographical areas, like the English Dialect Dictionary , the Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue , the Dictionary of American Regional English ,

4876-405: The general public. Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the general public for help in providing citations for 50 selected recent words, and produced antedatings for many. The results were reported in a BBC TV series, Balderdash and Piffle . The OED ' s readers contribute quotations: the department currently receives about 200,000 a year. Historical dictionary Typical features of

4968-543: 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

5060-520: 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

5152-489: The historical dictionary (in the sense of a word-list explaining the meanings of words that were obsolete at the time of their compilation) was the first form of dictionary developed; though not being scholarly historical dictionaries in the modern sense, they did give a sense of semantic change over time. Early modern European dictionaries also often included a significant historical element, without being fully historical in form; for instance, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of

5244-679: 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

5336-420: 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

5428-695: 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 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

5520-520: 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

5612-432: 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,

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5704-486: 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,

5796-443: The language. Academicians were to be paid an annual stipend of 500 franchi , or 1,000 francs if they were working on the dictionary, while 1,200 was provided for the secretary. Nevertheless the work remained incomplete: publication stopped after the letter "O", which ended when the entry for 'ozono' was reached in 1923. From 1955 the plan of work changed, and the aim became to produce a great historical dictionary that would include

5888-417: 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

5980-487: 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

6072-748: The letters A–F was completed in 2016. There is also the Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch which exclusively covers words loaned into German from other languages, which were largely (though not entirely) omitted from the Grimm dictionary. There is also a Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch covering Early Modern German , the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch covering Middle High German , and an Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch covering Old High German . The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae underway in Munich

6164-572: 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

6256-486: 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

6348-424: The only words analysed are those which are courteous and relevant ("che abbiano gentilezza e sieno a proposito"). As far as lemmas are concerned, there were a great many local Florentine forms, as well as a number of latinisms . Among the items not included were terms either already in common use or particularly obscure. Technical and scientific terms had only brief summary descriptions. The individual entries have

6440-430: 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)

6532-694: 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

6624-470: 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

6716-404: The published works of great writers to include the unedited manuscript texts held in the collections of the various Florentine academies; he also compiled usage from writers after the golden age, including Lorenzo de' Medici , Francesco Berni , Niccolò Machiavelli , and, indeed, from his own writing. He also drew on non-Florentine sources such as Pietro Bembo and Ludovico Ariosto . The work

6808-631: 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,

6900-451: 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 the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting

6992-523: 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

7084-492: 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

7176-422: 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

7268-491: The various languages of Europe. The main historical dictionary of English, the Oxford English Dictionary , was initiated in 1857 and was completed in 1928. Recently the availability of historical text corpora and other large text databases such as digital newspaper archives have begun to influence historical dictionaries. The Trésor de la langue française was the first historical dictionary to be based mainly on

7360-465: 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

7452-514: The way it was organised, and in the large number of supporting quotations it provided for each entry, highly unusual in those days. The second edition, also edited by Bastiano de' Rossi, was published in Venice in 1623. It was largely a reprint of the first edition, with some added material from more recent authors such as Annibal Caro , Lorenzo de' Medici , Michelangelo , Claudio Tolomei , it:Ludovico Martelli and it:Bernardo Segni . It contained

7544-459: The work of Liddell and Scott on their Greek–English Lexicon (1843), based on a translation of Passow's work into English. However, it was not until the beginning of the Deutsches Wörterbuch project of the Brothers Grimm in 1838 that a historical dictionary of a modern language was attempted. Throughout the later nineteenth century numerous historical dictionary projects were started for

7636-470: The works, meaning that the budget is often limited; historical dictionary projects often survive on a grant-to-grant basis, seeking new funding for each new section of the work. Some historical dictionaries, such as Jonathan Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang , have proven to be so expensive for their publishers that they have ended production before the dictionary was completed. Traditionally historical dictionaries were produced by employing

7728-422: 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 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

7820-522: 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

7912-414: 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

8004-466: Was edited entirely in Florence – eventually, thirty six academicians were working full time on it – although the printing was done in Venice under the supervision of the Accademia's secretary, it:Bastiano de' Rossi . The original title for the work was Vocabolario della lingua toscana (1608) However when it was in its final stages of development and a request for permission to print had already been sent,

8096-566: Was extended to include Iacopo Sannazaro , Benvenuto Cellini , Benedetto Menzini and. Lorenzo Lippi . In comparison with the previous edition: During the Napoleonic period Tuscany was ruled first as the Kingdom of Etruria and then annexed to France (1807–1814). During this time the official language of government was French. Nevertheless on 9 April 1809 Napoleon issued a decree allowing Florentines to use their native language alongside French, in

8188-447: 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

8280-476: 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,

8372-460: Was published in 1612. The work was innovative because it was one of the first examples of organising entries in alphabetical order rather than by topic, as then became the norm for this kind of book. In other respects too, it was organised differently from sixteenth-century lexicons, with less distinction between the language of prose and the language of poetry, as well as fewer references to regional uses and grammatical issues. In terms of etymology

8464-630: Was published in 2009 and is largely based on data from the Oxford English Dictionary ; a similar project is now underway for the Scots language . The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is the largest dictionary of the Dutch language, founded on historical principles and published from 1864 to 1998, with a supplement following in 2001. The largest historical dictionary of German is the Deutsches Wörterbuch originally compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and completed after their death in 1961. A second edition of

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