The second issue is the loss of a valuable historical document. It is well established that the original version of the OED (largely preserved in OED2) treated periods, genres and sources unevenly, so that its record of language was distorted in many ways: it under-represented the 18th century, for example, while over-representing the vocabulary of great writers highly rated by its Victorian and Edwardian editors, such as Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Dickens and Tennyson (see our pages on Top Sources and elsewhere). These distortions and biases tell one about resources available to the lexicographers at the time and shed light on their methodology: in other words, they encode significant historical information. Similarly, OED2's definitions and usage labels, in most cases carried over unchanged from OED1, record cultural assumptions of their time, providing invaluable evidence of social attitudes relating to race, sex and the body, gender, politics and so on from the Victorian period through to the 1970s and 1980s. The loss of an electronically searchable form of OED2 means that these features of the original dictionary can no longer be systematically studied. A literally vast quantity of historical evidence, shedding light on many different aspects of culture and society, has been removed from the possibility of academic study.

The third issue is that the new online form of the Dictionary does not enable searches which distinguish between revised and unrevised entries. So the impressive new search facilities - not least those flagged up on the front page of the website (here), especially Timelines, and Sources - deliver results that are at best confusing and at worst misleading. For fuller discussion see next page on OED Online's New search tools.