While users have more options now, print dictionaries continue to be popular
This year marks the 90th birthday of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). As part of the celebrations, a word appeal titled, ‘Words Where You Are’ that aims to unravel the link between place and language was launched. Over the years, the OED has included words from other languages as well as been launched across languages, the most recent being an EnglishMalayalam dictionary by Oxford University Press (OUP). Judy Pearsall, dictionaries director, OUP, shares insights on what goes into the making of a dictionary. Edited excerpts: options for users than there were a few years ago. Oxford dictionaries are used across the globe, and we still sell millions of copies of print dictionaries every year. Print dictionaries are especially important in places where access to the internet is expensive or unavailable, or where few people own smartphones. Also, some users like to use the physical book and integrate this with their studies and reading offline. We update our dictionaries on a regular schedule, around 3-4 times a year. Our dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive – that means we aim to describe how language is actually used, rather than saying how it should be used. Therefore, when choosing which words to include we look at evidence of real-world language use.
To do this, we use corpora – huge collections of language data drawn from sources such as newspapers, magazines, and social media, which allow us to track and analyse changes in the language and potential new words. Our vision at Oxford Dictionaries is to enable rich, diverse language communication in the digital age and to give voice to all people in a rapidly changing world.
Documenting the course of the English language is clearly a part of that, and we work with speakers of English worldwide to ensure that the breadth of usage is represented wherever English is spoken.
But our mission does not stop there. That is why in 2015 we launched Oxford Global Languages, a programme aiming to bring dictionary and language content online for 100 of the world’s languages for a wide variety of uses.
The languages of India are key to the success of this programme, and we believe that all people should have language resources they need in their mother tongue in order to play an active part in today’s vibrant multicultural society. Dictionaries contain a huge amount of information about words and their meaning, translation, usage, pronunciation, and spelling.
In today’s society this information is more vital than ever before, since it is also used to power a whole range of digital products and services, from web search and data mining to machine translation and assistants such as Alexa and Siri.
Oxford Dictionaries content is used by the world’s largest technology companies to underpin the services we use on our phones and laptops everyday – and through our Oxford Global Languages programme we are increasingly able to provide content in multiple languages. Oxford has the largest and longest-running language programme in the world and we track new uses and meanings on a daily basis.
Our lexicographers across the globe use their skill and judgement to assess huge amounts of data revealing facts about the changing language and to determine which changes are made available in our dictionaries. Our approach to language is always objective, descriptive and agnostic, rather than restrictive or controlling.