Examining the OED

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

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What does the OED tell us about the English language?

Examining the OED sets out to investigate the principles and practice behind the Oxford English Dictionary, an extraordinary achievement of scholarship and labour and the greatest dictionary of English ever compiled.

The project is wholly independent of the OED itself, and seeks to provide scholarly commentary on and analysis of OED's methodology and practice.

Its main aim is to explore and analyse OED's quotations and quotation sources, so as to illuminate the foundations of the dictionary's representation of the English language.

See About the project for more information, and the site map for a conspectus of the material put up so far.

The background to the project is explained in

Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED

(Yale University Press, 2007), a history of the OED
in the 20th century. Click here to buy it on Amazon.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 05 January 2012 )

News

Recently published on EOED: OED editions, updates and revisions
This newly expanded section of the website explains the successive versions of OED and reviews the re-launched OED Online (December 2010), the biggest change to occur in OED since the Dictionary went online in 2000. Major features of the re-launch include powerful new search tools and wide-ranging bibliographical modifications, along with (most unfortunately) the removal of OED2 as a separately searchable entity online. See discussion of all these plus more in the following new pages:

Examining the OED was heavily dependent on the data available via the old site (in particular the searchable version of OED2), which ceased to be available in March 2011. The loss of this invaluable resource means that comparisons between the old and new versions of OED, and assessment of the current revision of the Dictionary, are now either much more difficult or no longer possible.

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Other recent pages on EOED:

OED's treatment of specific female writers of the long eighteenth century (project funded by the Leverhulme Trust), beginning with introductory account here under Types of source. After a note on Reading and recording conventions, individual pages follow on:

Jean Adam: OED's record of the ballad 'There's Nae Luck About the House', Adam's collection Miscellany Poems, and lists of Unrecorded words and usages in her work - New words or senses, Antedatings, Postdatings, and those plugging OED's 18c gap or Early 18c gap

Penelope Aubin: Aubin and the OED, together with some Unrecorded words or usages, and those plugging OED's 18c gap or Early 18c gap

Anna Seward: firstly on Seward's poetry, and the Justified neglect? of this body of work by OED, along with lists of Unrecorded usages in her poetry - New words or senses, Antedatings, Postdatings, and those plugging OED's 18c gap or reducing it (18c top-up); and secondly on Seward's letters, along with discussion of First quotations, Hapax legomena, and Seward and OED3.

Further pages discuss Women's distinctive vocabulary (Distaff and kitchen and Courtship and marriage) and respective numbers of quotations in OED (Men and women compared).

Last Updated ( Thursday, 05 January 2012 )

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