Charlotte Brewer

OED Online Re-launched: Distinguishing Old Scholarship from New

In December 2010 Oxford University Press re-launched the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) website and instituted far-reaching changes to the online version of the dictionary, which has been undergoing revision (as opposed to successive supplementation) for the first time in its history. Alphabetically sequential revision was abandoned, lists of revised entries ceased to be updated, and the independent version of OED2 was deleted. These changes, apparently aimed at a general audience, have made it impossible to track the progress of the revision or see the different stages and characteristics of OED’s history. Over half the entries in the website version of OED are still unrevised from the first edition (completed 1928) and are the product of technology, scholarship and cultural assumptions now out of date. To interpret OED’s evidence correctly (particularly when making electronic searches), readers need to be able to distinguish between old scholarship and new, and understand the varying historical provenance of the entries they consult. Little or no guidance on these matters is currently provided by the website. In demonstrating the problems this causes for lexical researchers (including via the links supplied with the Historical Thesaurus of the OED) this article examines terms for homosexuality, showing that partially re-written entries confuse the historical record preserved in successive versions of OED.

Shakespeare, Word-Coining and the OED

We do not need to be historical lexicographers or experts in Early Modern English language to guess that Shakespeare was an experimenter with language. The inherent relish in combinations of words such as ‘butt-end of a mother’s blessing’ (Richard III, 2.2.98), ‘summer-seeming lust’ (Macbeth, 4.3.87), ‘fleshment of this dread exploit’ (Lear, 2.2.120), ‘To lip a wanton in a secure couch’ (Othello, 4.1.70), ‘paddling palms and pinching fingers . . . virginalling / Upon his palm’ (Winter’s Tale, 1.2.117, 127–8), ‘underpeep her lids’ (Cymbeline, 2.2.20), ‘Come, you spirits . . . / unsex me here’ (Macbeth, 1.5.39–40) – to take a random handful of many possible examples – is self-evident, and readily appreciated by any modern reader or auditor of his plays. And if we turn to what is still the most comprehensive authority on English vocabulary for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Oxford English Dictionary, in order to see just how innovative Shakespeare was in using such characteristically vivid words and compounds, we often find good justification for the intuition that Shakespeare was lexically creative. On countless occasions he is identified there either as the sole user of the locution in question, or as the first user, with other writers coming after him whether in conscious imitation or coincident adoption of the same usage. So, in the examples above, Shakespeare is uniquely cited for summer-seeming, fleshment and the verb virginal (‘to tap with the fingers as on a virginal’); and he is recorded as the first person to use butt-end in a non-literal sense, lip to mean ‘kiss’, paddle to mean ‘finger idly or playfully’, under-peep and unsex. The more of Shakespeare’s words one looks up, the more one discovers that, time after time, according to the OED, he turns out to have used language in wholly individual ways or (more often) to have originated usages that subsequently became established in the language. Pursuing individual words in this way is interesting but scarcely adds up to a general picture. Can we come up with a systematic and reliable estimate of how many new words Shakespeare contributed to the language? And what assumptions are involved in investigating this subject? This article attempts to begin to answer this question, in the first place by considering the character and reliability of our main investigative tool, the OED itself, and secondly by reviewing its successive record of a number of first citations from Shakespeare – i.e. words and usages recorded by OED as first used by this writer. The OED was originally compiled over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and although it was supplemented in the 1970s and 1980s with more modern vocabulary, its treatment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained unrevised and uncorrected until 2000. In this year, online publication began of

Prescriptivism and descriptivism in the first, second and third editions of OED

There is a pervasive view, held by academics and educated laypeople alike, that the Oxford English Dictionary is a descriptive work. When plans for this great dictionary were first taking shape, the originators made their intentions very clear. Archbishop Trench, delivering the two lectures to the London Philological Society in 1857 which initiated the project, famously stated the axiom that the lexicographer ‘is a historian of [the language], not a critic’, while the Philological Societys Dictionary Committee announced to its members in a document of 1860 that their job was to list and describe words accurately and disinterestedly.

The Oxford Quarto Dictionary

Abstract Oxford lexicography at the beginning of the 20th century was dominated by the OED. This work, based on the analysis of vast quantities of historical evidence, represented the acme of 19th-century scientific philological scholarship which was to give birth to the academic discipline of linguistics. Many educated people at the time, however, were opposed to the descriptive analysis of language, especially given the declining standards of literacy they frequently identified in newspapers and elsewhere. In the 1920s, Oxford University Press planned a dictionary that would straddle these two positions, and persuaded H. W. Fowler to take on its editorship. The ‘Quarto’ dictionary, as it was first called, was to be an innovative work which would combine scholarly lexicographical method with judicious information on usage, at the same time drawing on great works of English literature as its sources. After many years of labour, the project was aborted in 1958 (Fowler having died in 1933). Its early stages and eventual demise, as revealed in papers in the archives of Oxford University Press, illustrate the clash between prescriptivism and descriptivism (still alive today) in language matters, and the increasing irrelevance, to both dictionary users and makers, of literary example.