Documentation

The Dictionary has in the past been criticized for its apparent reliance on literary texts to illustrate the development of the vocabulary of English over the centuries. A closer examination of earlier editions shows that this view has been overstated, though it is not entirely without foundation. The revised text makes use of many non-literary texts which were not available to the original Victorian readers and their immediate successors, particularly social documents such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters such as the York Civic Records, Gilbert White's Journals, and the Diaries of Robert Hooke. The inclusion of material from sources such as these allows the editors to provide a fuller picture of the vocabulary of (especially) the Early Modern period. Further reading of similar sources will doubtless result in additional significant discoveries, as will the re-examination of texts already ‘read’ for the Dictionary.

Various factors contribute to the number of quotations that are used to illustrate the history of a particular word or meaning in the Dictionary. In some cases (depending on the length of time a term has been recorded in English) an interval of fifty years between quotations might be appropriate. In others, a longer or shorter time span might be satisfactory. Other significant factors include the relative frequency of the term in a given period, the availability of quotation material, and the need to illustrate numerous spelling variants and grammatical structures.

Approximately 5,800 new illustrative quotations have been added to the first revised range (an increase of 93%), considerably enhancing the documentation of most entries. Almost one in three meanings is now illustrated by one or more earlier examples, some of just a few years, but many of considerably more. Words are sometimes seen now to have arisen at an earlier period of the language than was previously recognized: Old English (such as Magnificat) rather than Middle English, Middle English (such as macaroon, Macedonian, madwoman, and magnificent) rather than Early Modern English, etc.

The Oxford English Dictionary maintains four major reading programmes which make substantial amounts of new data available each year to the editors. The UK and North American Reading Programmes together contribute some two hundred thousand illustrative quotations annually to the Dictionary's reading-programme database. The texts read for the Dictionary include novels, poetry, diaries, textbooks, newspapers, periodicals, magazines, film and radio scripts, and many other sources, mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in the case of the North American programme, stretching back to the colonial times. The Historical Reading Programme addresses texts from the Early Modern period into the nineteenth century, supplying many antedatings and later examples of words already recorded in the Dictionary, but also identifying words and meanings not yet covered by the Oxford English Dictionary. The Scholarly Reading Programme ensures that scholarly articles relevant to the analysis of the vocabulary of English and published since the First Edition of the Dictionary are monitored for the OED department's files. In addition, collaboration with the other major historical dictionary projects around the world allows the Dictionary to benefit from material gathered for these dictionaries, and many private contributors make the findings of their own reading and research into the history of the language available to the Dictionary.

The material made available by dictionaries such as the Middle English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and many others has also considerably enhanced the coverage of historical areas and varieties of English in the revised Oxford English Dictionary entries. An extensive file of quotations covering Early Modern English (numbering almost three million quotations) has kindly been made available to the editorial staff of the Dictionary by the University of Michigan. This material was originally collected to form the basis of a proposed Dictionary of Early Modern English (unfortunately the dictionary was not completed: see R. W. Bailey, "Progress toward a Dictionary of Early Modern English 1475-1700", Proceedings of the Second International Round Table Conference on Historical Lexicography, ed. W. Pijnenburg and F. de Tollenaere, Dordrecht, Holland, 1980, 199-206), and has contributed significantly to the analysis of the language in the Early Modern period represented by the revised text. Examples of first recorded uses deriving from this corpus include machinate (verb), mad-doctor, and magisterious. Again, a full list of major secondary sources consulted by the Dictionary will be published in due course.

Sources only available on CD-ROM or the Internet have been used for the first time in the Dictionary. Online editions of newspapers, for example, are now regularly cited, and large textual databases such as the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online and the Making of America database of early American texts are monitored for useful material. These and others have considerably enhanced the variety of material cited in the revised entries, and doubtless many other similar sources will become available in the future. However, they are most conveniently used by dictionary editors for subsequent research once a lexical item has been identified for possible inclusion; traditional ‘reading’ is still, in most cases, the most efficient method of making this initial identification, especially when dealing with words having many different meanings, which are very frequently attested in machine-readable collections.

The Dictionary seeks to cite sources which will be accessible to readers in the future. Until a more secure method of archiving references to individual sites on the World Wide Web is possible, the Dictionary will prefer to make use of more established online collections. We are still at an early, and doubtless interim, stage in the accessibility of online sources and this is an area in which policy is likely to change as systems for archiving such resources become more established.

One effect of the extension to the available documentation is to show that many words formerly regarded by the Dictionary as still current are now apparently obsolete (e.g. machopolyp, macrophagocyte, and magnetoscope), and that many which were formerly unlabelled can now be reliably labelled as being rare (e.g. machinization, magnolious, and Mahdism). In all, the revised sample shows 52% more words and meanings marked ‘obsolete’ and 242% more marked ‘rare’ than was the case in the equivalent range of the Second Edition of the Dictionary. It is just as important to monitor how and when terms fade from the language as it is to record their arrival.

The process of adding extensive new documentation (for examples, earlier uses) would sometimes have unbalanced the selection of quotations published to illustrate a particular word or meaning. In these cases, some quotations formerly published in the Dictionary have been silently omitted.

Printed sources are normally dated from their date of publication (for printed texts). Manuscript sources are dated according to the date of the relevant extant manuscript, in the case of Middle English and early Scots material followed by an indication of the actual or presumed date of composition if this is substantially different. Old English sources are dated as either ‘eOE’, ‘OE’, or ‘lOE’ (the first and last indicate ‘early’ and ‘late’ Old English); this is because much of the extant record of Old English appears in late manuscripts and it is not generally possible to guarantee that the particular word under review was not altered or added during the process of manuscript transmission. Dating for Middle English material normally follows that established for the Middle English Dictionary. Although manuscript copies are sometimes available for texts published after the invention of printing, it is normally beyond the scope of this Dictionary to research authorial variation within these manuscripts.