Dawn Geddes finds out how you keep a dictionary up to date
How do you keep a dictionary up to date? Dawn Geddes finds out . . .
WHEN it comes to dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the Queen of them all. Packed with over 280,000 words, the ever-expanding publication, which dates back to 1928, is a living and breathing social history of the English word.
Senior Editor Denny Hilton tells us what makes the Oxford English Dictionary stand out from the rest.
“Unlike almost all other dictionaries, which only deal with current English words, the OED is a fully historic dictionary which means it not only defines a word with its current use, it also documents what the word meant in its entire history of use.
“The dictionary goes right back to Old English – so the terms can span over a thousand years, making it a much bigger dictionary than the rest.”
Denny says that because of the vast number of words that the publication contains, there’s a huge amount of work involved in putting it together.
“We’re just coming up to our ninetieth anniversary of when our first project was completed and published. At the moment we’re in the middle of a large project to revise the whole of OED for the first time.
“My role is to look at entries in their entirety, examining all the different senses of the word, the definitions and the evidence that we have gathered for that word’s use.
“Some of these entries might not have been reviewed in over a hundred years, so during that time the word has gathered all of this history and its meaning has developed, so I have to reflect that in each entry.”
Because of the document’s size, the publication is kept online, where it is updated regularly by the team. As the OED is a historical dictionary, once a word is added, it’s never taken out again.
This permanency means that the team have to be extremely careful when deciding which words they should add in.
“We don’t have any hard and fast guidelines for using new words, but we’re looking for words that have been used for a certain period of time and have a range of uses in different contexts.
“Usually a word has to be around for about ten years before we would consider using it.”
The OED website is a subscription site, but UK library card holders can access it for free. New editions of the dictionary are released every three months.
Each new edition can contain between 1,000 to 1,500 new words or senses of words, plus another 4,000 senses of existing entries which have been revised.
“We have our own databases which we use to monitor new words. We add hundreds and hundreds of words in it every week.
“We have databases which contain literally billions of different examples of words from all sorts of materials – from newspapers and online publications to things like sci-fi novels and children’s books!
“We then keep track of all of those words and their uses, so we can tell when they are trending and are substantiated enough to be included.”
As technology advances, so does the OED’S ways of keeping track of our ever-changing language.
“It’s become very easy to find evidence in recent years, because we can now tell if a word is ubiquitous through its use online.
“In recent updates we’ve added quite a lot of regional terms, which are really interesting. These include colloquial, slang and jargon terms which we really would have struggled to find evidence for in the past.
“We did a project with the BBC last year, who were putting something together for National Poetry Day. They were looking at regional words across the UK and it was amazing to see that many of the words that we might have believed had disappeared were actually still in use.
“The social media site Twitter has been really useful for finding examples of these types of word. We’ve added quite a lot of examples on to our databases from there because it’s so easy to see where the word has been used and how frequently.
“It’s helped us find recent uses for historical words which we didn’t think were being used any more, like ‘cheeselog’, a word for woodlouse which dates back to 1657, and ‘bobowler’, which means large moth, which dates back to 1852.”
Despite the volume of work that is involved, Denny says that he finds it fascinating.
“It’s just so interesting to see how language evolves over time. Because we record the history of each word, we’re telling readers the story behind it, giving them an insight into what society was thinking about during that time. The dictionary really is just a big book of stories.” n