'A poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer'

Even before the publication of OED2 in 1989, the editors in Oxford recognized the need for more immediate access to North American sources and began planning to develop Oxford's first official North American Reading Programme based on American soil. In fact, in preparing the original OED, James Murray had benefited considerably from an unofficial North American reading programme directed by Professor March at Lafayette College. On a number of occasions, most prominently in his well-known preface, Murray directed special praise at his American readers.

During the period of the four-volume Supplement to the OED (1972-86), American sources were widely read, but as part of the OED's reading programme based in Oxford. The fanfare that attended the publication in 1989 was quietly accompanied by another first for the OED: the establishment of its new American office in Morristown, New Jersey, and the recruitment and training of its first official readers in America.

The North American Reading Programme, in part because of the circumstances of its creation, has been associated with a number of other 'firsts' as well. From the very beginning, it broke with the tradition of having readers 'card' their quotations on the venerable six-by-four inch slips of paper.

Beginning with its first 84 quotations in August 1989, NARP (as it came to be known) has produced all its quotations in electronic form. As the NARP readers have always been scattered geographically across a large continent, it was necessary to invent from scratch a flexible system of data entry that enabled people with different equipment and computer backgrounds to contribute to what was to become an exceptionally accurate and homogeneous quotation database. Instead of writing out quotations by hand, NARP readers used highlighters to mark their catchwords and then either keyed in the texts with a word processor or text editor, or sent them to be keyed by trained keyboarders. The resultant files in a simple 'template' format were then converted automatically at a central location to structured electronic 'slips' in SGML format.

In this manner, the North American Reading Programme was able to grow within two years from a programme producing hundreds of quotations per month to one that regularly produces anywhere from twelve to sixteen thousand electronic slips per month. To date, NARP has sent over 760,000 quotations to Oxford, each of these averaging over twenty words of searchable text. These have been combined with a similar electronic corpus being collected by the reading programme in Oxford.

The NARP quotations have been taken from a wide variety of general, regional, and special subject texts of North American provenance. A recent count showed that over 5,500 individual texts have been perused by readers looking for examples of new words or new senses of words, ethnic or regional expressions, and special subject vocabulary (e.g. terms from baseball, computing, cooking and food, law-enforcement, Native American studies, plumbing, etc.).

More recently, as the OED revision process has moved into full swing, the North American Reading Programme has been actively engaged in reading historical sources as well. These include diaries, collections of letters and personal papers, historical non-fiction sources, and works by previously neglected authors (such as the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers).

The purpose is to build regional, diachronic depth into the electronic quotation database that will be used to ensure that the new OED remains the English dictionary of record in the twenty-first century and beyond.