OED on CD-ROM



The history of the Oxford English Dictionary (continued)



The first Supplement, 1928-1933


From the earliest days of the publication of the Dictionary it had been envisaged that a
Supplement or Supplements might be necessary, in order to keep the historical record of
the language up to date, and to take account of subsequent research into the vocabulary
already covered by the Dictionary. This possibility had been kept in view not only by
members of the Dictionary staff but also by a certain number of the regular ?readers?
who maintained a continuous flow of contributions to the material from which the work
was being compiled; moreover, communications of corrections and additions were
constantly sent in by many interested users of the published work. Consequently, when
the original Dictionary was completed in 1928, a great body of quotations had been
amassed with a view to a Supplement on a grand scale, which should not only treat the
new words and new meanings that had come into being during the publications of the
successive sections of the Dictionary, but should also correct and amplify the evidence
for what was already in print. It was soon discovered, however, that such a Supplement,
if it were to be at all a worthy and adequate addition to the main work, would demand
intensive research by experienced workers extending over many years. This course could
not be contemplated when the possibility of preparing a Supplement was considered as
work drew to an end on the original Dictionary.

It was therefore resolved to produce a supplementary volume, the scope of which would in
the main be restricted to the treatment of those accessions of words and senses which
had taken place during the preceding fifty years. To this limitation there were to be
two principal exceptions: items of modern origin and contemporary currency that had been
either intentionally or accidentally omitted from the Dictionary would be included, and
account would be taken of earlier evidence for American uses, which Sir William Craigie,
at that time editing the Dictionary of American English in Chicago, was in a position to
supply. Temporary or casual uses were recognized only in so far as they marked stages in
the recent history of scientific discovery, invention, or fashion, or illustrated the
progress of thought, usage, or custom during the half-century then under review. A few
important corrections or amplifications of existing definitions were introduced under
the necessity of bringing the work into line with recent research. The details of this
policy were established by Dr C. T. Onions, under whose editorship the first Supplement
to the OED was published in 1933.

The chief characteristics of the vocabulary set forth in the 1933 Supplement can be
summarized briefly: on the technical side, it exhibited the great enlargement of the
terminology of the arts and sciences at the close of the nineteenth century and in the
early years of the twentieth - biochemistry, radio telegraphy and telephony, mechanical
transport on land, at sea, and in the air, psychoanalysis, the cinema, to name a few
outstanding subjects; on the purely linguistic side, the varied development of
colloquial idiom and slang, to which the United States of America had made a large
contribution, but in which the British dominions and dependencies of the time also
contributed a conspicuous share. As in the main work, there was continually present the
problem of the inclusion or omission of the more esoteric scientific terms and of the
many foreign words reflecting the widened interest in the conditions and customs of
distant countries; it was acknowledged that the problem had not been satisfactorily and
comprehensively solved in every instance, as the material from which the Supplement was
compiled had been collected principally while the original Dictionary was still in
preparation, and following the same guidelines in operation during that work. In one
respect the 1933 Supplement went somewhat beyond the limits of the main Dictionary, in
its more generous inclusion of proper names; but even so, these were not admitted unless
they had some allusive interest or were important for some linguistic, literary, or
historical reason.

The result was a Supplement of over 800 pages which went far towards completing the
documentation of the English language up to the end of the first quarter of the
twentieth century and just beyond. However, extensive though it was, it still
represented only a restricted selection from a large collection of material from which a
much larger volume might have been produced. Once it had been completed, the OED team
dispersed, and the editorial staff, including the last surviving Editor of the original
Dictionary still in Oxford, Dr C. T. Onions, turned to other work. The OED library in
Oxford was broken up, and quotation slips that had not been used were stored away, some
later to be dispatched to other historical dictionary projects, notable for use in the
preparation of the Middle English Dictionary at Ann Arbor, Michigan and the projected
dictionary of Early Modern English.


A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, 1957-19867


After the Second World War the Delegates of the University Press decided to re-establish
a headquarters for the Dictionary in Oxford, and to prepare a revised version of the
1933 Supplement. In the end, this proved to be an even greater work than that which
circumstances had forbidden in 1928, an addition to the main Dictionary of one-third of
its size, taking almost thirty years to prepare. But this was not foreseen at the time.
The original intention was simply to amplify the existing Supplement in a single-volume
work of some 1,275 pages which would take account of the lexical development in English
throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In 1957, R. W. Burchfield, a New
Zealander who was then Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Christ Church,
Oxford, and formerly a Rhodes Scholar at the University, accepted the invitation of the
Delegates to edit the Supplement. It was envisaged that this new Supplement would take
about seven years to complete.

At this stage, the editorial office of the Dictionary was located on one floor of a
private house, No. 40 Walton Crescent, adjacent to the University Press?s printing works
and to the Clarendon Press itself. The presence in Oxford of Dr C. T. Onions provided
valuable continuity between the OED and the projected new Supplement, and at the time it
was still possible for the editor to receive the advice and encouragement of a small
number of people who had worked on or for the Dictionary in other capacities. However,
the lapse of some twenty years since the disbanding of the original OED staff meant that
one of the first duties incumbent on the new editor was the selection and training of
new assistants. In the days of the Dictionary itself, Sir James Murray had often found
the recruitment of suitable staff to be a problematic and uncertain affair, and so it
proved again. Gradually, though, the initial difficulties began to subside, and early
work in the preparation of the new Supplement began to take a steadier course.

The raw material for a dictionary on historical principles - a file of quotations
excerpted from the literature of the period treated - was almost entirely lacking. Among
the material left behind after work on the 1933 Supplement there was indeed a collection
of quotations numbering about 140,000, few of which had appeared in the Supplement
itself, which included illustrative examples of words excluded in 1933 because they were
not fully established at the time. Though useful, these materials fell far short of what
was needed, both in quantity and range: the whole literature of the eventful
quarter-century since 1933 had to be sifted from scratch. In 1957 an extensive reading
programme was inaugurated, covering printed sources of all kinds relating to late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century English. The sources included all the important
literary works, as well as many hundreds of popular titles, a wide range of scientific
books and journals, and large numbers of newspapers and periodicals, ranging from the
national press to the publications of the ?underground?. Numerous works containing
lexicographical information, such as Notes and Queries, American Speech, and many
dictionaries of regionalisms, slang, jargon, and technical language, were converted into
the form of dictionary slips. In addition, several valuable private collections were
submitted to the Press, and these were also added to the quotation files. Thanks to
these and subsequent valuable donations, to the comprehensiveness of the reading
programme, to the alertness of the departmental staff in their private reading, and to
the regular contributions of scholars and voluntary readers, the quotation file grew to
contain at least two million, and possibly three million, slips by the time of the
completion of the Supplement, and proved an excellent resource from which to make the
initial selection of items for inclusion in the dictionary and from which to document
the history of each term up to the present day.

At the same time it was necessary to build up a reference library of books in the
department to which staff could turn for additional information about items for which
entries were being prepared. Some volumes from the 1933 Supplement library were brought
together again, and a further 7,000 or so books, especially dictionaries, were gradually
acquired by the department. These consisted of books and periodicals dealing with the
development of English in Great Britain, America, the Commonwealth, and elsewhere; a
large collection of dictionaries (both English and bilingual), volumes on slang,
dialect, etymology, and as many of the subject areas treated by the dictionary as it was
convenient to house in the editorial offices, besides many of the novels, plays, and
collections of published diaries and letters, which had been ?read? for the dictionary?s
quotation file and were at hand when quotations included in the dictionary needed
checking.

By the early 1960s, it was clear that the development of the English language throughout
the world had been much more rapid than either the Delegates of the Press or the Editor
of the Supplement had at that time considered, and that the Supplement would occupy many
more pages than had been originally intended. The paramount importance of reassessing
the projected size of the Supplement had been highlighted by the publication in 1961 of
Webster?s Third New International Dictionary, which illustrated dramatically the
proliferation of new vocabulary in North America and Great Britain in the early and
mid-twentieth century. Webster?s Second had appeared just one year after the earlier OED
Supplement, in 1934, and offered a perfect basis for comparison in terms of the rate of
change in the language, bringing home sharply to the Editor and his staff the necessity
of improving considerably the OED?s own coverage of American English, and, pari passu,
other overseas varieties of English. The original plans were revised to allow for a
Supplement spanning three (and eventually four) volumes, concentrating much more
extensively on the vocabulary of North America, the West Indies, Australia, and the
other English-speaking countries of the world. The Editor drew a parallel between the
current state of affairs on the Supplement and Dryden?s remarks in the Preface to the
Fables (1700):

?Tis with a Poet, as with a Man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes,
in casting up the Cost beforehand: But, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his
Account, and reckons short of the Expence he first intended: He alters his Mind as the
work proceeds, and will have this or that Convenience more, of which he had not thought
when he began.8

A substantial research base had been built up by the mid-1960s. Besides assistant
editors and researchers in Oxford, the Supplement soon had permanent members of staff
working as researchers in the major libraries in London and Washington, and links with
language centres and with other libraries throughout the world. A panel of specialist
consultants was established to read and comment on individual entries in galley proof,
and another panel of scholars and writers to read through continuous sections of galley
proof with a critical eye. A radical departure from the policy adopted by the editors of
the original Dictionary was the appointment from 1968 of graduates in scientific
subjects, who took general responsibility for the drafting of entries in these
disciplines. The necessity of taking this step had been impressed on the Editor as a
result of his visit to the editorial offices of Merriam-Webster in 1967. Editorial work
on the Supplement began in earnest in 1964, and the first instalment of copy (A-alpha)
was delivered to the University Printer on 27 May 1965. From this point until the
completion of the Supplement editorial staff were involved simultaneously in the
preparation of copy for press, and in dealing with proofs. At first the University
Printer, and subsequently (with considerable overlap) Messrs. William Clowes and Son.
Ltd., of Colchester, and, in the final stages, Latimer Trend Ltd., of Plymouth, were
engaged in the typesetting of the Supplement.

The first volume of the Supplement (A-G) was published in 1972, and immediately
established itself as a worthy sequel to the original Dictionary. Soon after its
publication the Editor was honoured with the title of Commander of the British Empire
for his services to scholarship. The dictionary was fortunate in attracting the interest
of several scholars who began by reviewing the work in the academic press, and then
became valuable consultants to the dictionary itself. Gradually more staff were
appointed to the work of completing the Supplement, and by the mid-seventies some
twenty-five people were involved in one or other editorial task, drafting the initial
entries, reviewing the work of assistants, verifying bibliographical information, or
conducting essential library research. The second volume (H-N), in which was included a
dedication of the whole work to Her Majesty the Queen, appeared in 1976; by this time
the editorial offices of the Dictionary were no longer large enough to contain the
expanding number of staff, quotations, and research materials necessary for its
preparation. Furthermore, the scope of the Dictionary department had expanded under the
Chief Editorship of Dr Burchfield to include not simply work on the Supplement, but also
the compilation and revision of the other Oxford Dictionaries, and for a time, a number
of bilingual dictionaries as well. The department removed, therefore, to more extensive
offices in St Giles?, Oxford, in 1978; 1982 saw the publication of the third volume
(O-Scz); and the Supplement was completed after twenty-nine years of editorial effort
with the publication of the final volume in 1986.

Back to contents 

Copyright © Oxford University Press 2009
