December 2002 newsletter

If the lexicographers who worked on the First Edition of the OED were to visit the Dictionary's offices today, they would recognize much of what we do. Indeed, lying on my desk as I write are some of their own quotation slips, which have just been added to the database.

They would also have had no trouble appreciating the delights (and lexicographical challenges) of Canadian English. Some items of Canadian vocabulary did appear in the very first section of the OED, published in 1884, including Acadian ('of or native to Nova Scotia'); the Supplement of 1933 added many more, beginning with aboiteau - but our coverage has now gone even further. Katherine Barber takes us through some of the more recent (and tastier!) developments.

There is also, of course, much that would have been unimaginable to those First Edition lexicographers. It is an enormous leap from a world of slips and inkwells to one where we can at a stroke locate every instance of a given word in thousands of volumes of English literature, or in the entire run of a scholarly journal. As Emma Lenz and Sarah Williams explain in their article, the power of the Internet has transformed our work in many ways; and yet there is also a great sense of continuity. Historical lexicography is still the same process - of assessing the available evidence and distilling it into dictionary entries - and that, at least, seems unlikely to change.

A sadder change, and a great loss to the project, is the death of the OED's archivist, Jenny McMorris. Her contribution to Dictionary history and her work on Henry Fowler are celebrated in Elizabeth Knowles's tribute.

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