In both cases, readers were asked to write out the quotations on slips of paper (half sheets of notepaper; see
Proposal, p. 10), and include all relevant information - author, edition, date of publication, etc.
The completed slips were to be sent to the lexicographers where they were sorted and further digested, supplemented and reorganized in the process of editing (described by Onions
here).
Craigie and Onions's 1933 Supplement did not establish a full reading programme in the way that
OED1 had done earlier, since its purpose was so limited: to bring the Dictionary up to date for words and meanings that had appeared since the successive parts had begun to be published in 1884. Many outside readers had already sent in masses of slips recording such revisions and additions, and these had been stored systematically (and of course supplemented by the lexicographers themselves) by at least 1908 and probably from much earlier. In and around 1925 this material was sorted through once again in preparation for the job of editing, which got underway seriously in 1928. (Documentation on this phase of the Dictionary is preserved in the
OED archives, and its story is told in chapters 1 and 2 of
Brewer 2007b.)
Nevertheless, like Murray before them, the editors did make appeals for what they called
desiderata - words for which further examples were required in good quality print sources to supplement information that they already had - which they published in
The Periodical. The first list, which appeared in the issue of October 1928, included not only contemporary items of vocabulary like
A.B.C. shop (example wanted from before 1897),
ace (airman) (before 1918),
active list (before 1927),
airman (before 1910), but also other terms, which one would not necessarily associate with the early part of the twentieth century, such as
Aberdeen terrier (before 1880),
agin (the government etc.) (before 1904),
alley-way (before 1882). Respondents were asked to fill in the information on slips of paper, as in the past, and send them in to the Dictionary.
Burchfield's Supplement
By contrast with the previous Supplement (whose results were subsumed into his own), Burchfield established substantial reading programmes to cover all kinds of printed language. Burchfield's brief was limited however as regards the period of time his portion of the Dictionary was to cover, a limitation reflected in the directions given to the readers. As he wrote in 1973, 'The instruction we gave them [the readers] was quite simple: copy out a quotation for any word, sense, or phrase occurring in the source that is not already adequately dealt with in the O.E.D. or its Supplement (1933)' (
Burchfield 1973: 99).
Many readers nevertheless continued to send in revisions and additions to
OED1's treatment of earlier vocabulary; these were filed away and are now being made use of for the current revision of the Dictionary which began in the 1990s (
OED3)
.
Burchfield also published many lists of
desiderata, inviting the public to search for antedatings to specific items of vocabulary (it was to one of these that Marhanita
Laski responded in 1958). This tradition of appealing to the public for help with quotations continues today, most notably in the series of BBC television programmes
Balderdash & Piffle (described on
OED Online here).
