Speaker
Description
As the Oxford English Dictionary approaches the centenary of the completion of its first edition, this talk reflects on how the practice and possibilities of historical lexicography have changed over the past century. The first edition of the OED was produced letter by letter and entry by entry, culminating in the publication of its final volume in 1928. Alphabetical order is no longer a constraint, and for the past two decades entries have been selected for revision according to criteria such as cultural significance, semantic complexity, and user feedback, enabling more dynamic and targeted updates. In recent years there has been a further development in that the individual entry is no longer the only, or even the primary, unit of revision. Alongside traditional entry-by-entry revision, the OED is now undertaking systematic improvements to components across the text, sometimes supported by computational methods and AI. Key goals for the centenary include the addition of recent quotation evidence to all senses in current use, the modernization of outdated defining language across the dictionary, and the inclusion of etymologies and variant forms lists in all entries.
Looking beyond the text itself, the OED is also engaged in initiatives that position it increasingly as a digital dataset as well as a dictionary. These include the development of a historical corpus both as a tool to support editorial work and as a resource to complement OED data; and (in collaboration with the Historical Thesaurus team at the University of Glasgow) the further development and improvement of the Historical Thesaurus taxonomy, both as a structured dataset linked to the OED and as a tool which can support historical word sense disambiguation and other types of data analysis.
The argument advanced in this talk is not that historical lexicography should abandon its entry-by-entry craft, but that its future depends on combining that craft with methods designed for the dynamic, linked, data-rich digital environments in which dictionaries now live.