Lore, legend and just so many syllables: The Oxford English Dictionary is in the midst of a revamp

It is, in that sense, a particularly difficult time to be compiling a Third Edition of what is arguably the world’s most exhaustive compendium of words.

Work on this edition began in the 1990s. The goal was to produce a fully updated text. A lot had happened since the First Edition was completed in 1928. The Second Edition, in 1989, had been mainly a blend of the texts (the First Edition and the Supplements of 1972-1986).

Words had been added through supplements over the years, but it was time for a comprehensive overhaul. An effort to seek out new words, new usages, new meanings.

By 2000, the work-in-progress Third Edition was available online. It continues to be updated every three months.

The revisions are now 55% complete, but the last 25 years have been a balancing act, Fiona McPherson, a senior editor at OED, tells Wknd.

The biggest challenge is the sheer volume of material available now.

“It has undoubtedly made our job of language research easier in many ways – being able to access digitised versions of texts that have been published thousands of miles away, or run sophisticated computer searches to keep track of new vocabulary,” she adds. “But with that comes the challenge of information overload and the feeling that there could be important information just round the corner, or in a database that we haven’t thought to search.”

Meant to be

How does one track a language evolving so fast, around the world?

Unlike previous editions, this one draws on non-literary texts too, including wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals and letters, as well as film and radio scripts.

For updated slang, it reaches out to younger speakers of the language.

American yearbooks, for instance, have helped the team track which terms are likely to endure, and should therefore be added.

The word psych (used mockingly or playfully to indicate that one is joking or pulling a prank) is one such term that found its way into OED in December 2023, after usage on these lines was traced to a quote in a New Jersey yearbook from 1964.

Since the early 2000s, online sources, from messaging boards to Instagram and X, have been considered too.

Interestingly, OED has always been crowdsourced.

The dictionary has its roots in an 1857 proposal to compile a “New English Dictionary” that re-examined the language. The effort, backed by the Philological Society, a London-based organisation dedicated to the study of languages, was led by archbishop and poet Richard Chenevix Trench and philologists Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Furnivall.

They and a group of volunteers began to comb through English literature across centuries to put together a comprehensive index of words and their several meanings.

In 1879, Oxford University Press (OUP) agreed to publish the work, with James Murray as the dictionary’s first chief editor. In 1885, Murray decided to extend the crowdsourcing effort, and installed a red post box outside his Oxford home (where it still stands), as an invitation for anyone to suggest a term that ought to be added.

Drawing from all these sources, the First Edition was completed in 1928.

It spanned 10 volumes, 15,490 pages and 252,200 entries. Experts consulted included linguists, lexicographers, historians, as well as notable niche collectors of objects ranging from ancient relics to pornography and erotica.

JRR Tolkien contributed time and effort to that First Edition. For a year, in 1919, he researched etymologies of words that began with “w”, ranging from waggle to warlock (before moving on to serve as a professor of language and literature at Oxford; the Lord of the Rings books came later, in the 1950s).

Even Murray’s 11 children helped; they were offered tiny sums in exchange for arranging the thousands of crowdsourced suggestions in alphabetical order.

The effort threw up challenges in unexpected places. “Of” was the entry he struggled with most, Murray would later say.

Getting everything said isn’t easy. “Run” is currently the longest entry, with 245 main senses and subsenses, as well as numerous phrases and phrasal verbs linked to the word. It dethroned “set”, in fact, which was the longest entry until 2011.

New records like that one can be revealing. One possible explanation for the surge in meanings of “run” could be the proliferation of machines — first automobiles, then computers and now apps. “It remains to be seen whether “set” will overtake “run” once we finish our revisions. It seems unlikely that “set” has been as semantically productive, but time will tell,” McPherson says.

Once upon a term

The earliest dictionaries did things fairly differently.

A Table Alphabeticall (1604), one of the first such compilations in English, sought only to tackle “hard words” such as oppilation (stopping) and noyance (hurt). The volume was put together by schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey, “for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons”, as he put it.

By 1785, a British reserve-force captain named Francis Grose had compiled an early dictionary of slang. The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue listed colourful terms he overheard on late-night excursions to London’s slums, dockyards and taverns. “Admiral of the narrow seas”, it noted, was someone who drunkenly vomited into the lap of another person. A hanging was “a dance upon nothing”.

By 1984, American-British journalist and author Bill Bryson had released his Dictionary of Troublesome Words, hoping to settle debates over whether it should be “fewer than 10%” or “less than”; “more money than her” or “than she”.

In 1983, computer scientist Guy Steele’s The Hacker’s Dictionary refocused the language on a new world of technology. So, “barf” now meant an error message; “crock” was a messy programming technique.

The idea of the dictionary rather took off, from there. By 1985, linguist Marc Okrand had released his guide to Klingon, the language invented for a species within the sci-fi TV series Star Trek (which first aired in 1966).

In 2011, writer Stephen D Rogers put together words from more than 100 such constructed languages (or conlangs; a term that’s been in the OED since about 1990). The conlangs covered include Elvish (created by Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings) and Na’vi (created by linguist Paul Frommer for the 2009 James Cameron film Avatar).

Things came full circle in 2016. To mark the birth centenary of the British author Roald Dahl (1916-1990), OUP released Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary, compiled by lexicographer Susan Rennie. It explained, for a new generation, nonsense terms such as “swashboggling” (very special), “scrumdiddlyumptious” (supremely delicious food) and “flushbunking” (making no sense whatsoever).