Project news

Peter Gilliver, one of the OED's Associate Editors (and former editor of OED News), has recently begun work on a commission to write a history of the Dictionary. He is planning to cover the whole history of the project, from its beginnings in the late 1850s to the launch of OED Online, and would be pleased to hear from other scholars working in this area, indeed from anyone who has information which could cast light on the history of the Dictionary. He can be contacted via oed3@oup.com.

Mike Hurrell, the OED's filing clerk since 1987, retired on 22 December. Mike came to join the Dictionary when his friend Tony Augarde (then the Manager of the Oxford English Dictionaries department) was looking for assistance with the OED's slip-filing mountain for a few weeks. Those few weeks turned into more than seventeen years.

Mike arrived in the OED's St Giles' office two years before the OED began storing some of its data electronically. It was supposed at the time that the amount of filing might dwindle when the Dictionary was computerized. However, the impact of the new technology on the volume of paper was overestimated. Mike moved with the OED to the main Oxford University Press site in the early 1990s, where he continued to be the mainstay of the fight to order the multitude of slips.

Mike has made an enormous contribution to the work of the OED. We will miss his great efficiency and knowledge of the labyrinthine slip files, and we wish him well in his retirement.