This subsection illustrates a further area in our investigations: what the
OED3 revisers are doing as they revise and rewrite the original material, most of it untouched since the first edition of
OED published 1884-1928.
The third edition of
OED currently underway, edited by John Simpson, is the first to attempt a wholesale revision of the Dictionary (see
Simpson and others 2004b,
Brewer 2004). It is a truly outstanding achievement. The work is
being compiled by a team of around 60 lexicographers mostly based in
Oxford but with an outpost in New York too. Every entry in the
Dictionary is being re-written from scratch, with new research
incorporated on each constituent element: spelling and pronunciation,
etymology, quotations of earliest, intermediate, and latest identifiable
use, definitions, and semantic analysis. For more information, go to our pages on
OED editions, updates and revisions.
Note: the second edition of
OED, published in 1989, did not set
out to revise the first edition (completed 1928); it merely spliced the
twentieth-century Supplement (1972-86) with
OED1 and added 5,000 new words
. In what ways are the present-day Oxford lexicographers re-visiting previous decisions about which sources to quote? Will they change existing quotation proportions in the
OED, adding more quotations from the eighteenth century, for example, or from sources written by women? Fewer quotations from the great writers of the traditional literary canon? Or will they retain and/or extend existing preferences?
How would or might such decisions be described and justified?