'Doh!' before Homer: the Appeals List and the process of continuous revision

I would be prepared to bet that many readers, on receiving this newsletter, turn first to the Appeals List. Among the reasons for this interest could be the hope of being able to make a contribution to the Dictionary and perhaps even beat OED staff at our own game; there is also the opportunity to gain an insight into work in progress. Users of OED Online may have noticed that we have now introduced a refinement to the amalgamated version of the Appeals List, indicating how contributions and research have changed the information originally provided, so that everyone has up-to-date information from which to work.

From our point of view here in Oxford, this interest from the public is invaluable. Even given the wealth of resources already available to us, including our unique collection of data from voluntary contributors past and present, we cannot hope to track down all the evidence we need. Some of our contributors have only ever sent us one (sometimes crucial) piece of information, while some are amazingly prolific, even recruiting friends and colleagues to the task. Our earliest example to date of the exclamation 'doh!', for instance, is a one-off contribution, and an extremely significant one; whereas we sometimes feel that contributors such as our old friend Fred Shapiro at Yale must have sent a valuable suggestion for almost every entry in the book! One of the most interesting aspects of the work I do is the introduction of such material, as it becomes available, to entries which have already been published online. As you know, we have the ability to refresh the existing online revised text every three months, at the time when the latest batch of new and revised entries is added. This enables us to continue to keep abreast of new research and developments, and to reflect the contribution of the 'Friends of the OED' as you respond to the challenge of the revised text. The changes we make include improving the bibliographic information in citations, adding earlier and later evidence to the paragraphs of quotations, and incorporating more up-to-date or detailed information into definitions, etymologies, lists of variant spellings, and so on. These changes can vary from the tiny to the dramatic, but all are significant; in some entries a six-month antedating can be vital, while others may be antedated by 10, 20, 50, or 100 years.

When we first started working on the entry for doh, it was easy enough to find post-Homer Simpson evidence (in the form 'd'oh!'), but we had a feeling that he wasn't the first to express himself in this way. It was also, as with many of the performing arts, very difficult to find the evidence in print for Homer's expletive. While some of us were trying to resolve this difficulty, others hurried excitedly to find our copies of Anthony Buckeridge's 'Jennings' books for the earlier examples we knew we would find there. However, it was not long before even earlier suggestions came in from our readers, thanks to the Appeals List. References to Laurel and Hardy films were common, and the research team started to try to track down scripts for these. Then came another suggestion: that we should look at the 1940s British radio show ITMA, where our correspondent remembered hearing it. Sure enough, we were able to find excellent examples in the scripts for this show held in the BBC's archives, and to add material as a substantial antedating. This can be seen in the revised version of the entry for doh, published online in March 2002. Watch out in subsequent quarterly updates to see whether our search for a quotation from a Laurel and Hardy film is successful.

I could continue citing many, many similar examples; at the last count we had made nearly 550 substantive changes to the published revised text, as well as many more less obvious ones. These can be found not only in the main block of revised entries in the letter M, but also in the new entries which are now being added throughout the alphabet. To give a few examples, the entries for full on, full monty, and been there, done that have changed since they first joined the Appeals List, and there is interesting added material in the current entries for magnetic declination, male chauvinist, Maliseet, and merveilleux.

For your chance to contribute, see the Appeals list in this issue