It's the way you say it: pronunciation in the OED

The provision of a transliterated pronunciation standing supportively next to each headword is something perhaps taken for granted by users of today's OED. Yet when the Philological Society's 'Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary' (NED, the First Edition of the OED) made its appearance back in 1859, no mention whatsoever was made of the subject of pronunciation. Indeed, it was not until the following year that the Society's members were informed that the 'Pronunciation and Accent' for each item in the new dictionary would 'be marked'. But what was a seeming afterthought on the part of the NED's founders has since become an OED institution upon which many readers rely. Offered in keeping with the project's general ethos of constructive descriptivism, rather than as elocutionary 'prescriptions', the indication of 'pronunciation and accent' is now fundamental to the make-up of the OED, and, as such, is a feature of the project certainly not being overlooked as the revision process continues apace into the new millennium.

Unlike our 19th-century predecessors, OED editors now benefit from the not inconsiderable luxury of having an established International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to draw on, as well as a wealth of reference materials which can be consulted when it comes to tackling an entry's pronunciation. The text forming the basis of the OED's current revision of pronunciations is in fact the newly published Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (ODPCE) by Clive Upton and William A. Kretzschmar. An invaluable and refreshingly contemporary resource for native and non-native speakers alike, ODPCE gives full standardized British and American IPA transcriptions for each of its headwords, and the OED is now following suit, by supplying an American pronunciation alongside each British one, in accordance with ODPCE's basic pronunciation models for the two national varieties.

American English is not, however, the only variety of World English to be given a newly enhanced profile in the OED. The general editorial drive towards making the Dictionary truly global in its scope is nowhere more evident than in its revised pronunciations. In addition to the British and American IPA transcriptions routinely appearing at each current entry, users of the Third Edition will be able to find pronunciations representative of Australian, New Zealand, South African, Canadian, and Scottish English for headwords specific to those varieties. Thus, a reader seeking guidance on the pronunciation of the South African terms Maatschappij (an early form of Boer local government) and mahewu (a type of drink made from maize-meal) will now find not only transcriptions indicating how a British or American speaker might say them, but also ones showing how they might be pronounced by a native speaker of South African English. Likewise, one can find an authentic New Zealand English pronunciation for mangemange (a kind of climbing forest fern), a Canadian one for machicote (a type of skirt formerly worn by Native American women), and so on.

In addition to these new and exciting developments, the handling of pronunciations is, unsurprisingly, also governed by the historical principles of the OED. Pronunciations given in previous editions of the Dictionary for words now marked obsolete (which would consequently have no pronunciation at headword level) are retained in our etymologies. Significant divergences between new pronunciations and those given in the NED are carefully recorded and, where necessary, commented upon: the NED (1906), for instance, gives an entirely unnaturalized French pronunciation for meringue. This was unusual even in its day, and that fact is recorded and discussed at some length in a note in the new etymology for the entry. The way in which pronunciations are sometimes seen to vary historically is not only taken into account with reference to the NED's version of things, however: an example of this can be found at the new entry for metallurgy, which tells us that, while Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 gives a pronunciation with the primary stress falling on the second syllable of the word, British dictionaries are subsequently divided as to whether the stress falls on the first or second syllable (some give both possibilities). The dominant American pronunciation, meanwhile, seems always to have placed the primary stress on the first syllable. On this occasion, the historical pattern of events is reflected in the OED's latest transcription (Brit. /mtaldi/, /mtldi/, U.S. /mdlrdi/), but, rather than allowing the reader to puzzle over why two possibilities are given for the British pronunciation and only one for the American, the OED here provides documentation in support of the pronunciation finally arrived at.

The OED's assimilation of the progressive work of ODPCE, its provision of IPA transcriptions for other national varieties of English, together with its retention of pronunciations past, and the sheer vastness of the range of subject-specific items for which transcriptions are also given, render it a formidable repository of pronunciation information for both the scholarly and the more general reader. And I, for one, am extremely grateful for the Philological Society's last-minute vote in favour of its inclusion all those years ago.