The UK reading programme: some current developments

Each year, readers working for the UK reading programme produce approximately 100,000 citations illustrating new words, phrases, and senses, taken from a wide selection of books, journals, magazines, and newspapers.

Increasingly, we are expanding to cover texts of other kinds. In 1999, our coverage of television scripts has been particularly improved. It now encompasses, thanks to some obliging producers and writers, unpublished scripts from a range of British programmes, including Brookside, EastEnders, and Casualty. All are invaluable sources of colloquial and slang vocabulary which can be hard to find in print, and which has, in many cases, been disseminated and popularized by the programmes themselves. The 1982 script of Episode 2 of Brookside, for example, has provided us with a satisfying nine-year antedating for our draft entry for the contemporary use of the adjective and interjection sound, meaning 'great, that's fine'.

Subject-wise, in 1999 alone our systematic coverage of specialized fields has meant our readers becoming instant experts in areas ranging from carriage-driving to waste management, line-dancing to cabinet-making, numismatics to social housing.

World English reading (the title 'UK reading programme' describes our administrative base rather than the geographical scope of our work) has included texts from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Caribbean, India, and South Africa, producing evidence of many borrowings and regional uses. Golguppa (Hindi, small round fried cake), poroporoaki (Maori, farewell speech), and bag juice (in Jamaica, a frozen juice drink) represent just a sample of those previously unevidenced in our files.

The resulting quotations, stored electronically together with those from the North American enterprise, ensure that lexicographers in Oxford have access to an ever-expanding resource of contemporary data on developments in the language across the English-speaking world.

Eleanor Rands is also the manager of the UK reading programme.