Murray’s 3rd in command: William Craigie

Murray’s 4th in command: Charles Onions

Murray’s successors

C.T. Onions Henry Bradley William Craigie

a1548 Hall Chron., Hen. IV. (1550) 32b, Duryng whiche sickenes as Auctors write he caused his crowne to be set on the pillowe at his beddes heade.

An OED slip for set (v.)

An OED slip for ne’er-do-well

1887 Beatrice Potter [N.B. Mrs Sidney Webb since 1892]Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1887, p. 483, The Dock Life of East London, The popular imagination represents the dock-labourer either as an irrecoverable ne’er-do-well, or as a down-fallen angel

William Minor, inmate of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane

OED editorial assistant 1919-1920

J.R.R. Tolkien

1928: OED (1st edn) completed;15,490 pages; 414,825 words

The OED Supplements

• Five supplements were published:– first one in 1933– four further ones in 1972-1986

• Aims: to keep up with new developments in vocabulary and to correct/add to the existing material

Editor of OED,1957-1986

Robert Burchfield

Second edition of OED

1989: 2nd edition

– Integrated all the material of the 1st edition and the supplements into one work

– Added 5,000 new words– 20 volumes

Editors of OED since 1985

John SimpsonEdmund Weiner

OED on CD-ROM (1992) and Internet (late 1990s)

– Moving from word to word at a single click– Option of making visible or suppressing

certain types of information– Many search options, e.g. searching through

all the quotations in the OED (ca. 17 million words of text – equivalent to ca 40,000 printed pages)

THE OED on the internet

http://dictionary.oed.com/

Optimistic plans for 3rd edition of OED

OED Newsletter January 1995

John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary:

“This is the first of a new-style series of newsletter, intended to keep readers up to date on progress towards the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, scheduled for publication in the year 2005. Our current objective is nothing less than a comprehensive revision of the OED, most of which has not been re-edited since the original publication of OED1 between 1884 and 1928.”

3rd edition of OED: a renewed encounter with reality

– A megajob (cost: £34 million)

– Aim: checking and correcting all the existing material; adding much more contemporary material

– So far: letters M, N, O, P, Q and R (in progress)

– Results are regularly added to the OED on its website (quarterly updates; the words RAN – REAMY were added in Dec 2008)

Modern appeals for assistance

BBC2 programme Balderdash and Piffle (2006; 2007)

• Generating interest in the project• Appeal for help from the public: WORDHUNT

e.g. balti – origins?the Beeb – who first used this form?to bonk – used before 1975?

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