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OED's past and present on the Web

The OED Online web site has for some time offered a window on the past, in the form of a section devoted to some of the more important printed documents relating to the Dictionary's history, including the paper "On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries", given by Richard Chenevix Trench in 1857, which is generally regarded as having led directly to the inception of the Philological Society's New English Dictionary (as the OED was originally known). This section of the web site will be expanded during the autumn to include several more historical documents (in facsimile), including the "Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public" issued by the Philological Society in 1879 following the appointment of James Murray as Editor of the Dictionary, and an early invitation to American readers to help with the collection of the quotations on which the Dictionary was based.

Also during 2002, and largely unnoticed, the OED itself has begun to include quotations found on the Web as evidence in its entries. The first batch of such entries, published in June, included quotations from web sites such as www.secret-passage.com (for the rare word miserabilistic), and newsgroups such as sci.chem (for miscoloration). While of course there are cases where a word's first known occurrence is in an online source, the Web has also proved useful as a source of evidence that words which have not been found in conventionally published sources are in fact still in use: for example, both miscoloration and miserabilistic would have required an `obsolete' label were it not for these postdatings from the Web.

In memoriam

In June we heard the sad news of the deaths of two scholars whose lexicographical work was (and remains) influential both generally and in relation to the OED. Harry Orsman was the editor, among many other works, of the Dictionary of New Zealand English (Oxford University Press, 1997), the standard guide to the history and usage of New Zealand English. Many years ago, Harry donated copies of much of his material to the files of the Supplement to the OED: the 89 illustrative quotations in the Second Edition of the OED that are taken from Acland's Early Canterbury Runs (for example) will all have come from Harry's material, as will many of the quotations with which we illustrated other New Zealand terms.

In the same week came news of the death of Dr Peter Wexler. Peter had first contacted the OED in the 1960s with suggestions for the Supplement, and more recently had been reading historical texts - mainly from the Early Modern period - for OED3. His tally of contributions amounted to over 60,000, targeted in areas (such as the history of science) where it was known there were gaps in the Dictionary's coverage.