The role of the
OED as 'treasure-house' is something that the
OED's publisher, Oxford University Press, has delighted in publicly embracing. In announcing the completion of the first edition in 1928, the Press claimed, 'it is a Dictionary not of our English, but of all English: the English of Chaucer, of the Bible, and of Shakespeare is unfolded in it with the same wealth of illustration as is devoted to the most modern authors' (
The Periodical, 15 February 1928, p. 1). In one of the publicity brochures released for the second edition of 1989, OUP reproduced a series of small portraits of twelve sources for the
OED, calling them, rather fancifully, '"Contributors" to the
OED': Chaucer and Shakespeare, John Locke and John Wesley; Johnson and Noah Webster - these apparently included on account of the influence of their dictionaries' influence on
OED; Austen; Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce.
Evidently, none of these writers actively contributed; they are merely cited - in very varying proportions (c. 33,300 times for Shakespeare; 227 for Woolf) - by the lexicographers; although Hardy certainly used and read the
OED, and possibly James Joyce too (Woolf's active use of
OED, if it occurred, has yet to be demonstrated; she mentions only the
Concise Oxford Dictionary. On Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf see respectively
Taylor 1993,
Deane 1998,
Fowler 2002; on Webster see
Brewer 2008).
Over the page, the brochure states that the
OED is 'at once a history of thought and of our civilization'; it is 'the supreme treasure-house of the riches of the English language'. But whose 'thought', and whose 'civilization'? As with Johnson's dictionary,
OED's treasures, in the form of quotation sources, were selected according to certain culturally determined tastes and values. It is a partial record, though none the less valuable, and loved by its readers, for that.
Burchfield enormously increased quotations from scientific, technical, and non-literary sources in the
OED (
Brewer 2007b: chapters 6 and 7). But he still believed that recording the language of great writers was central to the Dictionary's character, and quoted liberally from writers he identified as such. This legacy of pervasive quotation from literary sources is a tricky one for the current
OED lexicographers, engaged on the third edition, to deal with. While they will not wish to renege on this most cherished aspect of their Dictionary, it is not obviously consonant with their aim to present an impartial linguistic record (so far as such a thing is possible) of past and present usage. It is too early to be sure, as yet, what form their policy will take. They have expanded their range of sources even further than Burchfield (see pages at
OED3); nevertheless citation from certain literary sources (e.g. Dryden and Dickens, heavily quoted in
OED1, but also
Virginia Woolf) has significantly increased rather than declined.
Source: this page is based on material in
Brewer 2007b. See our pages elsewhere on this site of the public perception of literature, and therefore the
OED, as a treasure-house (
Literature and the nation,
Initial results: literary sources, and the
previous page).