The magna cum laude of dictionaries
by
Howard Richler
Alas, because language is in a constant state of flux, a
lexicographer’s work is never done. The first edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED),
replete with 414,825 words was completed in 1928 and ceremonial
presentations were made to President Calvin Coolidge and His Majesty
King George V. Supplements ensued but not until 1989 did a second
edition comprised of twenty volumes appear. According to The
Oxford Companion to the English Language,
this edition has “21,728 pages and contains some 290,500 main
entries, within which there are a further 157,000 combinations and
derivatives in bold type (all defined) and a further 169,000 phrases
and undefined combinations in bold italic type, totaling 615,500 word
forms.”
The pace of change is ever-quickening. In March 2000,
the 20 volume OED, plus three volumes of additions, became available
online and every word in the OED is being revised. So, 120 years
after the first editor of the OED
James Murray launched an “appeal for Words for the OED,“
John Simpson, the present chief editor, invited “readers to
contribute to the development of the Dictionary by adding to our
record of English throughout the world. Everyone can play a part in
recording the history of the language and in helping to enhance the
OED.” I believe
this project represents one of the greatest feats of scholarship ever
undertaken and accomplishes for lexicography what the Human Genome
Project is doing for biology.
Words, and new senses of existing words, are flooding
into the language from all corners of the world. Only a dictionary
the size of the OED can
adequately capture the true richness of the English language
throughout its history, and the developments in
English. By the time the revisions are completed
sometime between 2025 and 2030, the English vocabulary will most
likely have at least doubled. As a result, there may not even be a
print edition as it would require close to fifty volumes to complete
it. One reason so many words are being added is because of the
lexicographic advancements in the non-British and non-Ameican
Englishes, such as African and Asian varieties, whose words are
increasingly being recorded in the OED.
There is no longer only one English language; rather English is now
available in a variety of flavours.
Interestingly, the revision in 2000 began not with the
letter “A” but with the letter “M.” I asked John Simpson why
this was done and he replied that “the OED
editors wanted to start the revision at a point halfway through the
dictionary where the style was largely consistent, and to return to
the earlier, less consistent areas later.” In any case, by 2010 all
words from M to R had been revised and since then this alphabetical
format has been abandoned and every three months we now find revised
entries across the alphabet. For example, in December 2014 un-PC
was added; June 2014 introduced branzino,
a term for the European bass or seabass and also the verb Skype;
in March 2014, bestie achieved
OED validation.
Aside from cataloguing virtually every English word of
the last 1000 years, the OED,
in its online incarnation, offers a host of useful features for the
lexicographically-minded:
Timelines
In graphic form, timelines are provided that highlight
the year wotrds are first recorded in the OED.
Hence, the year I was born also featured the arrival of the words
cappuccino,
cybernetics and
transistor
whereas 1616, the year Shakespeare expired saw the birth of
acquiescent,
incidental and Kurd.
Top 1000 Sources
If you guess
Shakespeare as the most frequent quoted OED
source, you're not far wrong. The Bard, however comes in second and
is bested by the London
Times
(39,884 quotaions versus 33,127). Rounding out the top five are #3,
Walter Scott, #4, the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London
and #5,
Encyclopaedia
Brittanica.
The top North American source is the New
York Times
at #11 and the
Globe and Mail
takes Canadian honours at #212. I don't think too many people would
guess the Canadian runner-up - The
Daily Colonist of
Victoria, B.C. at #431.
Historical Thesaurus
The
historical thesaurus is a taxonomic classification of the majority of
senses in the OED. It
can be thought of as a kind of semantic index to the contents of the
dictionary. It can
be used to navigate around the dictionary by topic, find related
terms, and explore the
lexical history of a concept or meaning. It is divided in three
categories, the External World, the Mind and Society. So for example,
if you were researching Clairvoyance, you would click on External
World and then to the Supernatural heading, then to Paranormal and
finally Clairvoyance where you would find several entries such as
“second sight” defined as a supposed power by which occurences in
the future or things at a distance are perceived as though they were
actually present.”
The
feature that I find most useful in the OED
is the categories section and in my next two Lexpert articles I will
explore some of its dimensions.
Richler's
next book Wordplay: Arranged & Deranged
Wit will be published in 2016.
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