1930 onwards in OED3

This page begins with an Outline picture of the OED3 revision’s changes to the post-1929 OED2 record after the first 20 years or so of revision. Comparison with earlier periods shows that the huge quantities of new quotations added by OED3 to illustrate 20th- and 21st-century vocabulary far outstrip those for previous centuries.

It is also clear that the character and provenance of quotations now being collected for the Dictionary has decisively changed. As demonstrated in our earlier pages on Period coverage, the vast banks of citations from individual ‘great writers’ inherited from OED1 have continued to dominate the pre-1930 record in today’s OED Online as in the parent Dictionary. Under Most quoted sources for the post-1929 years, we show that OED3 has now moved away from such heavy documentation of Individually-authored sources – although the revision still shows a strange preference for citing from the outdated literary and cultural canon of writers preferred by the Supplement editor Burchfield. In general, however, OED3 is concentrating its energies on electronic searching of the large databases for Multi-authored sources – newspapers, journals and periodicals – that have become available in recent years.  

Outline

Chart 21 below displays the total number of quotations over 1930-2009 recorded in OED Online (searched December 2018) in comparison with the equivalent totals for OED2, the latter data deriving from searches of the OED2 database before it was removed from public consultation in 2010. As always, users of OED Online must remember that this version of the Dictionary lumps together revised with unrevised entries when its database is searched: care should be taken in drawing inferences from the results.

Chart 21: Total quotations in OED2 & OED Online (Dec 2018) 1930-2009

The OED2 line stops at 1989, the date this 20-volume print version of the Dictionary was published. OED Online’s quotations thereafter derive from the three volumes of Additions published in the 1990s and (much more significantly) the entirely new Third Edition published online from 2000 onwards. The OED Online line continues up to the last complete decade (2000-2009) treated at the time of collecting the data in December 2018. For explanation of these latter stages of the Dictionary see pages under OED editions.

Broadly speaking the OED Online quotation totals from 1930 onwards record a gradual rise in the documentation of vocabulary in English over the course of the 20^th century. In particular, the revisers have put huge effort into the post-1989 period where they were breaking new ground. However, the revision has yet to correct the striking dips in OED2’s equivalent documentation over 1940-1949 and 1980-89.  We can see more clearly where the revision energy has been concentrated if we hive off the totals for additional quotations per decade in OED Online and represent them independently. 

Chart 40 below shows the distribution of these additional OED3 quotations decade by decade from 1930 onwards. Both charts show how closely the OED3 revision is following the dips and peaks in OED2’s original collection of quotations up to 1989.

As with such correspondences between OED2 and OED3 over previous periods (see preceding pages under Period coverage), the question arises whether the OED3 revision is taking a sufficiently independent stance from previous versions of the Dictionary. Does this mirroring of patterns of documentation between OED2 and OED Online tell us about variations in the history of the language, or about the lexicography employed to record that history? 

Chart 40: Total ADDITIONAL quotations in OED3 (Dec 2018) 1930-2009

We cannot identify the new quotations up to 1989 with electronic searches but it is reasonable to assume that in the main they derive from the periodicals, journals and newspapers which have shot into prominence in OED Online’s current list of most quoted sources.  See Most quoted sources below.

Comparison with earlier periods

To contextualize the new quotation figures for the 20th century and beyond it is helpful to compare them with those of the 19th century. Chart 37 takes the record back to the 19^th century, discussed at 1800-1929 in OED3. 

Chart 37: Total quotations in OED2 & OED Online (Dec 2018) 1800-2009

The comparison points up the current unevenness of OED’s representation of the period post-1889. The dips that characterised OED1 and OED2’s record remain in that of OED Online, albeit less deep than in the previous versions. Overall, however, it is clear while OED1’s gathering of quotations peaked over the 19th century, OED3’s has peaked over the 20th century. This can be seen in Chart 38, which compares OED2’s documentation of successive post-1500 centuries with that of OED Online (as of December 2018)

Chart 38: Total quotations in OED1/2 and OED Online (Dec 2018) 1500-1999 by century

Chart 39 displays OED3’s totals more clearly since it presents the net increase in quotation totals as of December 2018: i.e., the difference between the OED2 and OED Online totals at this date.

Chart 39: Total ADDITIONAL quotations in OED3 (Dec 2018) 1500-1999

The disparities between the totals of quotations newly gathered per century is marked. The OED3 revision has amassed huge numbers for the 20th century: 549,954 altogether as of December 2018, over twice as many as the 235,728 quotations for 1800-1899 it had added to the OED2 record at the same stage.

Most quoted sources

As discussed elsewhere on EOED, e.g. Top sources and 1800-1929 in OED3, the OED3 revision is adding significant quantities of new quotations to the Dictionary from multi-authored newspapers, journals, periodicals. By contrast, it has departed altogether from OED’s earlier practice of quoting in large numbers from individually authored sources, unless from reference books providing a readily available source of specialist vocabulary (e.g. single-authored dictionaries).

Nowhere is this having more impact than in OED3’s documentation of the 20th and 21st centuries. No 20c author appears in the first 100 of OED Online’s list of ‘top 1,000 sources’ today. This is in stark contrast to the documentation for previous periods, all of which are represented by individual authors in this top section of the list: Chaucer, Langland, Gower and others for the pre-1500 period; Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Bacon and others over 1500-1699; Milton, Dryden, Pope, Defoe and others over 1600-1799, Cowper, Johnson, Steele, Richardson over 1700-1799, and Scott, Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson and others over 1800-1929.¹

Individually authored sources

As of June 2020, OED Online’s entire list of top 1,000 authors and works quoted in the OED contains just 46 post-1929 authors, so few that it is feasible to reproduce their names and details in a single table as below (see preceding paragraph for comparison with previous periods). As always, we must remember that OED Online does not permit distinction between old and new entries on its database and it is impossible to work out from the website which of these quotations was added in earlier versions of the Dictionary and which by the OED3 revision – unless by checking each quotation individually, not feasible when dealing with large numbers of results. However, as explained below, we can make an educated guess that this favouring of a culturally specific group of individuals derives from Burchfield’s Second Supplement, not from OED3’s new lexicography – though surprisingly, it emerges that OED3 is nevertheless continuing to expand representation of some of these individuals in the revised OED (Charts 42 and 43).

Individual post-1929 authors in OED Online’s list of ‘top 1,000 authors and works quoted in the OED’, June 2020

OEDO ranking	Author	Life-span	Quotations	Principal genre	Gender	Outside British Isles
104	Rudyard Kipling	1865–1936	3130	Novelist	M
142	James Joyce	1882–1941	2464	Novelist	M
151	George Bernard Shaw	1856–1950	2334	Playwright	M
169	D. H. Lawrence	1885–1930	2225	Novelist	M
220	P. G. Wodehouse	1881–1975	1843	Novelist	M
274	Aldous Huxley	1894–1963	1535	Novelist	M
335	H. G. Wells	1866–1946	1327	Novelist	M
445	John Buchan	1875–1940	1034	Novelist	M
466	William Faulkner	1897–1962	996	Novelist	M	US
519	John A. Thomson	1861–1933	906	Popular biologist	M
522	John Galsworthy	1867–1933	904	Novelist	M
561	Graham Greene	1904–1991	856	Novelist	M
581	Arthur Conan Doyle	1859–1930	825	Novelist	M
605	Dylan Thomas	1914–1953	797	Poet	M
629	W. H. Auden	1907–1973	778	Poet	M
657	T. S. Eliot	1888–1965	745	Poet	M
683	Ezra Pound	1885–1972	719	Poet	M
705	Julian Huxley	1887–1975	689	Zoologist and philosopher	M
711	Eric Partridge	1894–1979	684	Slang lexicographer	M
712	W. Somerset Maugham	1874–1965	684	Novelist	M
718	Sinclair Lewis	1885–1951	679	Novelist	M	US
735	Virginia Woolf	1882–1941	661	Novelist	F
737	Sidney Baker	1912–1976	658	Slang lexicographer	M
757	Dorothy L. Sayers	1893–1957	637	Detective novelist	F
770	Arthur Koestler	1905–1983	630	Novelist	M
781	Evelyn Waugh	1903–1966	622	Novelist	M
785	‘George Orwell’	1903–1950	618	Novelist	M
800	Elizabeth Bowen	1899–1973	607	Novelist	F
816	Lester V. Berrey	1907-	595	Slang lexicographer	M	US
823	C. Day Lewis	1904–1972	590	Poet	M
829	‘Patrick O'Brian’	1914–2000	586	Novelist	M
834	Walter de la Mare	1873–1956	583	Poet	M
838	Arnold Bennett	1867–1931	578	Novelist	M
844	J. B. Priestley	1894–1984	577	Playwright	M
864	John Masefield	1878–1967	563	Novelist	M
869	Winston Churchill	1874–1965	561	Politician	M
891	Roy Campbell	1901–1957	548	Poet	M
895	‘Nevil Shute’	1899–1960	546	Novelist	M	Australia
914	W. B. Yeats	1865–1939	536	Poet	M
937	Hall Caine	1853–1931	526	Novelist	M
941	Edmund Blunden	1896–1974	523	Poet	M
944	Rose Macaulay	1881–1958	521	Novelist	F
973	Agatha Christie	1890–1976	505	Detective novelist	F
979	Robert Bridges	1844–1930	504	Poet	M
997	Ngaio Marsh	1895–1982	493	Detective novelist	F	NZ
998	T. E. Lawrence	1888–1935	492	Man of letters	M

Click on the arrows to the right of the column headings to change the criteria by which the content of the table is displayed. The number of results shown (46 in total) can be varied by using the tool at top left.  

Almost all the 46 authors included in OED Online’s ‘top 1,000’ list are literary. Of these, an appreciable proportion are at the higher end of the literary spectrum (Joyce, Auden, Pound, Woolf etc), though a handful are less so (e.g. Christie, Shute). Just over half the 46 are novelists (27), ten are poets, three are lexicographers of slang and quoted mainly to instance such vocabulary, two are playwrights, while the remaining four are more various – a man of letters (T. E. Lawrence), a ‘literary’ politician or perhaps historian (Churchill), and two rather different writers on science, Huxley and Thomson. (Many of these authors wrote in genres other than the ones here identified as characterising their principal works). 

Only five of the 46 – Woolf, Marsh, Christie, Sayers, Bowen – are female (for OED’s treatment of Woolf, see Brewer 2009d). Three of these are detective novelists. Only five of the 46 lived and wrote outside the UK. None were born after 1914.

It should go without saying that this choice of authors reflects lexicographical and cultural values now long out-dated: the belief that literary writing should be prioritised in selecting quotations to illustrate the history and development of the language, the assumption that women rarely qualify as literary artists or bear useful witness to the linguistic record, the focus on Anglo-centric writers representing a particular literary tradition. Although many of the individual quotations concerned may have been chosen by the lexicographers as particularly apt, typical, or singular examples of the use of a word, the cultural homogeneity of these sources reflects a specific ideology, consciously recognised or not, which would not now be accepted by linguists as forming the basis for the study of vocabulary in English – nor, indeed, by literary critics and/or historians as forming the basis for the study of literature in English.

Notwithstanding the traditionalism inherent in this documentation of individual writers, the line-up of top sources indicates a shift from the lexicographical preferences and practices of OED1. Novelists are quoted more intensively than poets, while the huge quantities of quotations from historians, philosophers, and theologians which characterised the parent Dictionary are altogether absent.  

As noted above, the OED website does not allow us to identify which of these quotations derives from Burchfield’s Supplement of 1972-1986 and which have been more recently added in the OED3 revision. However, on the basis of sample checking of the entries in which these quotations occur, it seems safe to say that all of these authors were already quoted in significant numbers in OED2. The literary canon they suggest is in accordance with surviving reading lists for the 1972-86 Supplement (which supplied the post-1929 content of OED2) and with Burchfield’s own published views.² 

Now that it is well established in linguistic and lexicographical practice that descriptions of the language should be based on a generically balanced range of evidence, we would expect the OED3 lexicographers to have turned away from the special favouring of literary sources, especially linguistically eccentric ones like Joyce, and to have made significant attempts to redress the male/female imbalance (as well as other sorts of imbalances indicated by the choice of sources in the table). But a notable feature of the post-2000 OED3 revision has been continued citation from this outdated literary and cultural canon, though in relatively small amounts compared with OED1. This is shown in Chart 42 below, where we list the new totals for those authors previously researched by EOED (see Chart 41) who are now in the ‘top 1,000’ list (as of June 2020). 

Chart 42: Quotation totals for individual authors in OED Online’s ‘top 1,000’ list post-1929 compared with OED2 equivalents where known (June 2020)

Chart 43 displays the increase or decrease between OED2 and OED Online (June 2020) for the same group of authors:

Chart 43: OED3’s changes to OED2 quotation totals, where known, for post-1929 ‘top 1,000’ authors (June 2020)

Obviously this is a tiny sample. However, it illustrates that the OED3 lexicographers have demonstrated the same interest in expanding the record for 20th-century male canonical writers – according to outdated criteria – as seen for previous periods, while continuing to under-quote from female authors of comparable standing. See similar evidence in our discussion of Top sources (Chart 28) and in Men and women compared. OED3’s surprising record of vocabulary from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry (archaic and dictionary-derived) is reviewed in Brewer 2019(b).

Multi-authored sources

For the purposes of extremely cautious comparison, the table below reports the first 50 post-1929 sources on OED Online’s ‘top 1,000’ list, as of the June 2020 update, which are not by individual authors.

A number of caveats should be registered. First, as with all OED Online data, these findings represent an undifferentiable mixture of old and new scholarship. Secondly, the quotation figures provided by the OED Online list cover the whole period of publication of the source from which they are taken, which in most cases is well before 1930. Unfortunately, the search tools on the OED website do not permit reliable searches of these titles by date.³ Finally, our attempt to characterise each publication by subject matter is evidently generalised and imperfect.   

Nevertheless, the contrast with the table above is striking. These multi-authored sources are being quoted in the OED3 revision to date in far greater numbers than individual authors; they include slightly more non-UK (albeit only North American) sources; they indicate a particular wish, on the part of the OED3 revisers, to record specialist vocabulary in the sciences – possibly more than to record specialist vocabulary relating to the arts and social sciences. Inferentially, male contributors to these publications, and hence to the OED’s record, will by far outnumber female ones, while the register of language most evidenced in such sources will be dominated by formal written English. Regional varieties of English and of informal language, including social media, will be barely if at all represented. 

It may well be that the OED3 revisers are recording a profusion of vocabulary from such alternative provenances, registers and styles of English, extracting the relevant quotational evidence from a wide variety of individual sources which do not show up in their ‘top 1,000’ list. But until today’s OED gives us more information about its editorial policies and practices – or greatly improves the search tools on its website – it is impossible to know. 

First 50 multi-authored sources covering the post-1929 period: from the list of ‘top 1,000 authors and works’ on OED Online (June 2020)

OEDO  ranking	Title	Publication dates	Quotations	Outside British Isles	Subject matter
1	Times	1788–	43348		Newspaper
4	Philosophical Transactions	1665–	15894		Science
5	Encyclopaedia Britannica	1768–	14549		Encyclopaedia
7	New York Times	1857–	13749	US	Newspaper
9	Daily Telegraph	1855–	12102		Newspaper
10	Nature	1869–	11718		Science
12	Guardian	1959–	10664		Newspaper
13	Daily News	1846–	9922		Newspaper
19	Blackwood's Magazine	1817–1980	8301		Cultural
21	Independent	1986–	8275		Newspaper
22	Science	1883–	8220	US	Science
25	Washington Post	1877–	7045	US	Newspaper
26	Harper's Magazine	1850–	6949		Cultural
28	Acts of Parliament	1266–	6747		Legal
29	Listener	1929–1991	6728		Cultural
30	London Gazette	1666–	6683		Reference
31	Lancet	1823–	6607		Medical
34	New Yorker	1925–	6131	US	Cultural
35	Scientific American	1845–	5954	US	Science
40	New Scientist	1956–	5461		Science
51	Economist	1843–	4912		Political
58	Observer	1792–	4723		Newspaper
59	Times Literary Supplement	1902–	4658		Literary
82	Spectator	1828–	3698		Newspaper
83	Annual Register	1758–	3696		Reference
88	Proceedings of the Royal Society	1830–	3552		Science
96	Punch	1840–1992	3353		Humour
107	Time	1923–	3101	US	Newspaper
109	Century Magazine	1881–	3026	US	Cultural
110	British Medical Journal	1857–	3014		Medical
111	American Naturalist	1867–	3008	US	Science
114	Atlantic Monthly	1857–	2972	US	Cultural
118	American Speech	1925–	2893	US	Language
123	Life	1883–	2666	US	Cultural
125	Chicago Tribune	1847–	2641	US	Newspaper
127	Glasgow Herald	1805–	2632		Newspaper
129	Chambers's Journal	1854–1956	2627		Cultural
146	Financial Times	1888–	2413		Newspaper
147	Globe and Mail	1844–	2409	Canada	Newspaper
149	Daily Mail	1896–	2374		Newspaper
150	New York Review of Books	1963–	2345	US	Cultural
159	Quarterly Review	1809–1967	2275		Cultural
164	Los Angeles Times	1881–	2256	US	Newspaper
178	Sunday Times	1822–	2177		Newspaper
180	Mind	1876–	2170		Philosophy
181	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences	1915–	2147	US	Science
182	Contemporary Review	1866–	2142		Cultural
184	Baltimore Sun	1837–	2129	US	Newspaper
192	North American Review	1815–	2068	US	Cultural
198	Journal of the Chemical Society	1862–1965	1992		Science

Last updated on 10 September 2020

1. See, respectively, EOED pages on 1150-1499 in OED3, 1500-1699-in OED3, 1700-1799 in OED3, 1800-1929 in OED3.
2. See the discussion on the Character and provenance of quotations in Burchfield’s Supplement on the previous page). In the case of pre-1930 quotations from these authors, many will also have been added by Burchfield.
3. Searches for ‘The Times’, for example, yield results from many other publications with Times in their title – Los Angeles Times, Musical Times, etc.