Electronic resources

Once the reading programmes have alerted us to a new word or meaning, we use electronic resources to provide more evidence of that word, in order to fully determine its definition and trace its history.

A large number of databases are available to Oxford lexicographers.

Incomings

The Incomings database contains over two million quotations from the main UK and North American Reading Programmes maintained by the OED. The advantage of this database over the traditional method of writing out a quotation on a slip of paper and filing it alphabetically is that any word from a quotation can be matched by a search, not just the “catchword” that caught the original reader's attention.

This allows the reading programmes to concentrate on highlighting new or unusual words and meanings, since the quotations for these words will also contain a number of common words, which are just as easy to find by electronic searching.

Searches on this database can also be restricted to a particular date range, subject, or location, which can be useful when trying to trace an example of a common word with a specific meaning in a particular region or field of study, etc.

The British National Corpus

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a database of 100 million words of English as written and spoken in the UK. It consists of a balanced collection of whole texts and large parts of texts of different levels of formality and technicality, including hundreds of books, newspapers, magazines, and journals from the latter part of the twentieth century, as well as transcripts of spoken English and ephemera such as leaflets, advertisements, and tickets.

Searching for a common word in the BNC shows how many meanings it has, how frequently those meanings are used, and in what context.

The British National Corpus was compiled in a collaboration between Oxford University Press, Oxford University Computing Services, Longman, Chambers, the Unit for Computer Research on the English Language at Lancaster University, and the Research and Development Department at the British Library.

The World Wide Web

In the last few years there has been an explosion in the number of resources available to lexicographers on the Internet. Of particular use have been large text databases such as the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online, a vast collection of prose and poetry covering a period of several centuries; the Making of America database, containing facsimiles of early American texts; Medline, containing medical abstracts; JSTOR, containing facsimiles of many journals; Nexis, an archive of newspapers and magazines from the last thirty years; and many more.