The evolving role of the Oxford English Dictionary

Financial Times - By Lorien Kite - Nov.15, 2013

©Thom Atkinson

The ‘OED’ has had its own website since 2000; some of the old slips, featuring definitions and citations, from the dictionary’s archive

Look for a topical expression in the Oxford English Dictionary and you may find it is older than you think. “Phone-hacking”, for example, was first used in the early 1980s. Americans have been worrying about “fiscal cliffs” of one kind or another for more than 50 years. And the desire for an “Arab spring” goes back to at least 1975 – or longer in the case of cyclists, for whom the term was coined in the late 19th century to denote a component in the suspension of saddles.

Words need a bit of a track record to make it into the OED. Once there, the rule is that they never come out, with obsolescence marked, instead, by dagger symbols sprinkled like memento mori through its pages. In general, the lexicographers look for evidence of at least 10 years’ use, though they do break this rule occasionally: “tweet” in its Twitter sense is included despite only having been around since 2006; the more recent “trending”, however, is not. “It’s on the back burner,” says Craig Leyland, a member of the new words team. “If it keeps being used in the same way, then it will most likely be going in.”

The OED, which this month experiences a rare change in leadership, is different from other English dictionaries. Most obviously, it is much, much bigger. The first edition, published in 10 instalments between 1884 and 1928, defined more than 400,000 words and phrases; by 1989, when two further supplements of 20th-century neologisms were combined with the original to create the second, this had risen to some 600,000, with a full word count of 59m. Once the monumental task of revising and updating that last (and possibly final) printed incarnation is complete, the third edition is expected to have doubled in overall length
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