The revised and updated text

Each new group of fascicles or instalments of the First Edition of the Dictionary was prefaced by a brief introductory analysis of its contents. The present introduction offers a similar summary of the contents of the first range of newly revised and updated entries (running from the letter M to the word mahurat), as well as some general comments on the policy and scope of the revision.

There was no particular necessity to start the revision work at the beginning of the alphabet. In fact, there were a number of reasons for not doing so, perhaps the most important being that the early sections of the published Dictionary, as with most large-scale historical dictionaries, are characterized by a gradually evolving editorial style and a comparative paucity of documentary evidence. It was therefore decided to start the revision midway through the text, at the letter M, in order to benefit from the editorial stability which the First Edition had achieved by this point.

The first revised and updated instalment consists of 1,045 main entries, containing approximately 2,820 meanings, subordinate words, and phrases. 286 of these main entries have been added since the Second Edition of the Dictionary, though sixty-three first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series (1993, 1997). All entries added from the Additions Series have also been reviewed and wherever necessary revised for online publication.

The text of this range of entries contains about 200,000 words in the Second Edition of the Dictionary; the equivalent revised and updated range contains approximately 400,000 words of text, representing an overall doubling in size.