Memories of the Oxford English Dictionaries, 1972-2005

My involvement with the Oxford English Dictionaries began in 1972, as a homeworker typing the fifth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary on to 6x4 slips for the late John Sykes's sixth edition. John then revised them as required and some were retyped if necessary. When the sixth went to the printers in 1976 they were so pleased to have typed, easy-to-read copy that they asked if all dictionary slips could be typed in future.

By 1974 I was going into the dictionary rooms for one day a week to do clerical work, and I gradually became a jobbing typist / clerk, working on anything from a complete dictionary to smaller tasks, as required. In 1975 I began to type marked-up quotations in journals on to slips for the quotation files. In the early 1980s I did some reading for quotations for the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary under Lesley Burnett's guidance, and learnt a great deal about what constitutes a good quotation (and how difficult it could be to find one). Being paid to read was a great privilege. During this period I also began to card and interfile the BBC Pronunciation Unit bulletins. At some stage I typed bibliographical information for John Paterson, and did a specimen for the late Joyce Hawkins's Encyclopaedic Dictionary. I recall learning a great deal about car engines from Tony Augarde's School Dictionary, and I compiled and typed an index for Edmund Weiner's Mini Guide to English Usage. Another interesting job was typing Oxford Word and Language Service (OWLS) letters.

Great changes to the printing world occurred during this period, and, after the 1986–7 printers' strike at Wapping was over, to OUP as well. Computers were in the pipeline for everyone, and this interested me greatly. Until their arrival, when a dictionary was completed there was no way of checking cross-references, or of recovering a particular vocabulary, say for O level Biology. From what I had read about computers, I thought you could probably do this sort of thing. I also thought that the introduction of computers might mean the end of my association with the dictionary rooms, but thankfully Bob Burchfield had faith in me and made it clear that I would still have a role.

The Miles 33 system was the first computer system to be installed. There was a good deal of rivalry for possession of a workstation. By then Bob Allen's Concise Oxford Dictionary 8 was on the stocks, together with the Oxford Spelling and Hyphenation Dictionary and the Advanced Learner's Dictionary. We also had the use of a word processor, courtesy of Wang Electronics, which was then run by Andy Rosenheim in an office above the Munchy Munchy café in Park End Street. He was very helpful indeed to us, and at one stage we ran classes there in the lunch hour for people who needed a basic introduction to keyboards and how this new technology worked. The aim was to create a pleasant, familiar environment in which everyone could proceed at their own pace and practise as much as they liked. My grandchildren seem to have been born knowing what we had to learn and remember to do, like 'saving'.

In 1985 the Press appointed a consultant, Ronald Mackintosh, to help with the choice of computer systems. Ronald had been a printer, and the Society of Printers awarded him a gold medal for his work in bit-mapping characters for computer storage. He soon decided that a local firm, Compulexis, could provide the best system, and we enjoyed a happy collaboration with them. The system was elegant and flexible, and the documentation well-written and clear. The hardware was Apricots, and IPA and Greek were marked up for us on the keyboard. The printers were daisy-wheels, which were unbelievably noisy, and changing the ribbon could be so messy that replacements came with plastic gloves.

During the middle and late 1980s and early 1990s I worked on the Concise Oxford Dictionary 8, organizing the keyboarding and filing routine, the storage of all the paper copy, and, eventually, the critical-reading and proof-reading. I also did some work on the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, and some keyboarding of new entries for the OED. All the back-up was manual in those days, and most of each Friday afternoon was taken up with feeding in floppy disks and labelling them.

In the mid-nineties, the decision was made that trade dictionaries editors would type directly into the database, but John Simpson found a place for me on the Oxford English Dictionary, performing various keyboarding tasks as a 'Data-capture Assistant'. For some time I retained a link with the trade dictionaries, occasionally updating databases, and so on, but gradually all my time was spent on the OED. Keying the results of the quotations checking programme (QEMS work) was fascinating for a bookworm like me. It is difficult to think of any other set-up which lets you dip into the best of such a wide range of works, and revisit those you know you will never have time to read again.

January 2001 brought a huge change to the OED, with the introduction of the searching of selected databases on the internet to expand quotation paragraphs. My work at last had an editorial content, which was quite a responsibility when all the emphasis before had been for accurate copying. However, my interest soon overcame my nerves, and I am glad I did not miss it, even though some databases have strange habits.

My first pay cheque was for March 1972, and my last pay slip was for February, 2005, so the years are even, which contents my tidy mind. Please join me in a toast to a happy, part-time, casual working life at the Oxford English Dictionaries, and in another to the continuing success of OUP.