Marghanita Laski contributed about a quarter of a million slips to the
OED, making her the single most productive volunteer during the course of the Dictionary's history - though her work went into the
twentieth-century Supplement rather than the first edition of the
OED. A
short sketch of her life and work for
OED can be found in our page on
Individuals in the
Reading and readers section of the site.
In addition, she wrote an important letter to the
Times Literary Supplement, published on 13 October 1972 (p. 1226) to coincide with the appearance of the first volume of R. W. Burchfield's Supplement. In this she described the Supplement as 'magnificent', but expressed the fear that
OED was in danger of becoming a 'magnificent fossil', given that the vast bulk of the Dictionary was still, despite the Supplement, unrevised since its original publication between 1884 and 1928. She also reported her view, based on extensive historical reading, that non-literary texts were a significant, and hitherto comparatively neglected, source of vocabulary illustrating the history and development of the English language.
Both these features of
OED are now being addressed by
OED3. The current
OED team
has begun systematically to revise every aspect of the first edition as well as the twentieth-century Supplement, and is quoting from non-literary texts much more intensively than in the past. (For an overview of
OED3 see pages beginning
here, and for examples of
OED3's use of non-literary sources see
Wills and inventories.)
