February 2000 newsletter

The OED has seen more new years than most contemporary institutions, but the year 2000 is still a particularly exciting one for us, as it sees the launch in March of the OED Online. The Online edition will make available to Dictionary users the complete text of OED2 and the three OED Additions Series volumes, together with regular updates as the Dictionary is revised. The editors and researchers will continue to prepare text for quarterly publication, initially at a rate of about a thousand entries per quarter.

This issue of the OED Newsletter is devoted to one particular aspect of their work: the collection of raw data, in the form of quotations, through the OED's various reading programmes. Both editors and readers have contributed to these accounts of the current reading programmes, while some historical perspective is provided by Jenny McMorris's description of the earliest incarnation of the OED's reading programme.

It is always useful to be reminded that although the technology now available to editors and OED users is beyond anything the first editors could ever have imagined, the fundamental business of collecting and ordering the material which provides us with historical and contemporary evidence of usage has never really changed. As Edmund Weiner explains, rather than writing quotations on slips many readers now highlight books and journals for later capture, or key quotations straight into electronic file templates. But the quotations themselves would still be instantly recognized by Furnivall, Murray, and Craigie. Thus, as we enter the new millennium, we look both backwards and forwards: backwards, to the time-honoured traditions and scholarly standards established by Murray and his contemporaries; and forwards, to the new technology which will make the fruits of this research available to more people than ever before.