Reflections
Eager reader of history, mystery, classics, biographies, steampunk, lit fic, science, scifi, and etc. My reviews are mostly positive--I rarely finish or write about books I don't enjoy. My TBR is too high for that.
O.E.D.’s New Chief Editor Speaks of Its Future
Word lovers will have to wait a little longer. Being the digital age changes are afoot, but one thing at least remains the same--it still takes quite a while to complete a new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. From TOM RACHMAN's article in the New York Times:
"To compile a dictionary of nearly every word in the English language was an endeavor typical of Victorian times, complete with white-bearded gentlemen, utter confidence and an endearingly plodding pace. After a quarter-century, the first installment emerged in 1884. Its contents? “A to Ant.”
In our own impatient age, the Oxford English Dictionary is touch-typing toward a third edition, with 619,000 words defined so far, online updates every three months and a perma-gush of digital data to sort through.
. . .
The O.E.D. has stood apart, partly for authoritative definitions but chiefly for its unmatched historical quotations, which trace usage through time. The first edition, proposed in 1858 with completion expected in 10 years, was only finished 70 years later, in 1928. The second edition came out in 1989, at a length of 21,730 pages. Work on the third started in 1994, with hope of completion in 2005. That was off slightly — by about 32 years, according to the current guess of 2037."
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