Distractions

There are a number of myths about the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most prevalent of which is that it includes every word, and every meaning of every word, which has ever formed part of the English language. Such an objective could never be fully achieved. The present revision gives the editors the opportunity to add many terms which have been overlooked in the past, but it should be understood that fully comprehensive coverage of all elements of the language is a chimera. That said, the content of the Dictionary is certainly comprehensive within reasonable bounds.

It is also often claimed that a ‘word’ is not a ‘word’ (or is not ‘English’) unless it is in ‘the dictionary’. This may be acceptable logic for the purposes of word games, but not outside those limits. Proponents of this view expect dictionaries to include ‘proper’ English, whereas dictionaries in fact include many slang, informal, technical, and other words which such people might not consider to be ‘proper’, typically labelled according to the register of language to which they belong. It may be added here that the question ‘How many words are there in the English language?’ cannot be answered by recourse to a dictionary.

Another myth about the Dictionary, and about dictionaries in general, is that they provide a comprehensive analysis of each word treated. Again, this cannot be the case in a finite text. But more important, philosophically, is that any dictionary attempts to provide information in a manner which is accessible to the reader. In order to do this, it is customary to subdivide polysemous words by their meanings and by the grammatical and syntactic forms in which they are found. However, any extensive examination of the documentary evidence for a language soon uncovers examples of usage which straddle two or more of the stated meanings of a word, often idiosyncratically and in ways which it is not practical for the dictionary to illustrate. The reader should be aware of this incongruity, and should regard the Dictionary as a convenient guide to the history and meaning of the words of the English language, rather than as a comprehensive and exhaustive listing of every possible nuance.

Readers who have had access to the CD-ROM version of the Dictionary in the past have expressed considerable interest in the number and type of quotations from individual sources. The fact, for example, that Shakespeare was cited over 30,000 times in the Second Edition of the Dictionary has been adduced as an index, amongst other things, of Shakespeare's lexical creativity. It is probably true to say that too much weight has been given to such statistical theories. First citations from an author are of interest in that they represent the earliest recorded evidence for a particular term. But in many cases this does not mean that a word or meaning was first used in the source cited, but rather that no earlier evidence has yet come to light. Printed evidence will typically not exemplify the first-ever use of a term (except for some self-conscious coinages), but only the first that has been found in the historical record. Later quotations for a particular word or meaning are selected from the sum of those available to the editors, but often reveal more about the reading programme for the Dictionary and the selection criteria of the editors than about the lexical significance of the source.

The points above are not intended as a disclaimer, but as a corrective to those who expect more of a dictionary than it is bound to deliver. It is hoped that the contents of the revised and updated text of the Dictionary will give a clearer picture of the history of the English language through the development and meaning of its vocabulary than has been possible in previous editions. Advances in scholarship over the last one hundred years provide ample material for revising the text, and the complementary work of the editorial staff and their associates has also uncovered a mass of documentary and other evidence which allows us now to offer what may be seen as an appropriately detailed and comprehensive analysis of the English language as it has developed over the past one thousand years and more.

John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford, March 2000