Worksheets

Working with the online version of the OED

by T. T. L. Davidson

Retired Senior Fellow
School of Modern Languages & Cultures
Department of Linguistics & Phonetics
University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT

1. What is the OED?
2. What can it do for you?
3. Using this worksheet
4. Accessing the dictionary: 4.0. OED Online's Help system
5. Searching
6. ‘Find Word’ searching: 6.0. The entry display; 6.1. Entry Map; 6.2. strived/striven - strove/strived?; 6.3. Using wildcards
7. ‘Find Word’ assignments: 7.0. Linguistics jargon; 7.1. Spelling choices; 7.2. Use of derivational morphemes; 7.3. Irregular verbs
8. Using the Simple Search button for more sophisticated searches: 8.0. Investigating grotty; 8.1. Searching the dictionary ‘apparatus’; 8.2. Australian slang
9. Assignments using the Simple Search button: 9.0. Rhyming slang; 9.1. English vocabulary from other languages; 9.2. Collocational relationships
10. The interrelatedness of definitions and meanings: 10.0. Step 1: Select the lexicon; 10.1. Step 2: Identify the relevant senses for each word; 10.2. Step 3: Compare the definitions; 10.3. Step 4: Draw a map
11. Assignment on tracing sense networks
12. Searching for morphological elements again
13. Assignment on morphological elements
14. Studying meaning changes: 14.0. The OED and controversial usage - disinterested; 14.1. Sudden change in context; 14.2. A word ‘field’; 14.3. Do we really need a thesaurus rather than a dictionary?
15. Assignment in discriminating senses
16. Dates and meanings
17. Assignment on quotation dates
18. And yet more searches...
19. Creating printed and file output: 19.0. Printing; 19.1. Saving files
20. Leaving OED Online
21. References

1. What is the OED?

The Oxford English Dictionary is the most comprehensive dictionary of English. In printed form it comprises 20 volumes and takes up 4 feet on the library shelf. It is the parent of a large family of smaller dictionaries more familiar on people's shelves, such as the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It is popularly viewed as the most authoritative source of information on word meanings in English, for example when judges wish to clobber witnesses or counsel with ‘ordinary’ meanings of words in court. It is not, in fact, a very convenient tool for what is possibly the commonest use of a dictionary - to look up a word's spelling. It contains a great deal more information than most unreflective dictionary users, or users of smaller dictionaries, realise, but because of its basic principles it is not the easiest dictionary to use. However, as a tool for students of the English language, it is unrivalled, and in its electronic form it can be used much more flexibly than in the case of the paper form.

It is a dictionary on historical principles, in its original editors' famous phrase. That is to say, it is intended to display in a historically ordered form the changes, including growth and shrinkage, of the meanings of all the non-technical Standard English vocabulary from early Middle English to the present day. It contains many words and many meanings of words which are obsolete, and it arranges its account of meanings in a historically ordered way - earliest meanings first. This is not necessarily the easiest way for a modern user to find the information on the present-day senses of a word. The word's very oldest senses may still be alive, and also the more recent ones, but along the way there may be several marked with the little dagger symbol which tells you the meaning is obsolete.

The other very important principle of the OED is that, following Dr Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 (which it was intended to replace), the editors gave generous citations, that is, examples of the words in use from a wide range of written texts, mainly literary, but, especially in the modern Second Edition, from newspapers, magazines and many other sources (though not spoken ones such as news broadcasts).

2. What can it do for you?

I shall assume that anyone might want to use the OED to do the following:

Look up the meanings of a word and how they have developed
Look up when words and meanings were first used
Find out the etymological source of a word

If you are a student of language and linguistics you can use the OED for the following tasks:

To find parts of words (e.g. the uses of prefixes such as pre-, arch-, or peri-, or suffixes such as -ology, -nik, or -ate) and generally to investigate word formation in English
To find out how far the OED systematically records relationships between words such as synonyms (e.g. the relevant senses of reel and spool)
To secure some support for the ideas that speakers have about likely collocations of words (e.g. that we can say notable collector and distinguished collector, but only notable frequency and not *distinguished frequency)
To examine the details of processes in English such as the emergence of ‘zero-derivation’ forms such as when paper started being used as a verb, presumably having been around for some time as a noun¹.

Students of literature have for the better part of a century used the OED for:

Digging out meanings of words which poets might have been using when the poem was written but which have since disappeared (as William Empson did in his celebrated Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930, revised in 1953))
Trying to recreate the vocabulary ‘fields’ of political and social discourses of the past
Finding out what contribution particular writers have made to the development of new words and meanings

The aim of this worksheet is to open up some of the possibilities of the online form of the Oxford English Dictionary as a language research tool. It is much more than a place where you look up meanings, spellings, etc. In its electronic form, it makes possible certain kinds of exploitation which were impossible with the paper form, and is an enormous source of information about many aspects of English.

Berg (1993) is the ultimate guide to using the OED, and explains every feature intelligibly and with profuse and fascinating illustration.

3. Using this worksheet

This is the first version of this worksheet. Every so often after a new major feature of OED has been covered with examples, you will find an assignment.

4. Accessing the dictionary²

Using a web browser, go to the OED's home page.

A page will open, with a suitably Oxfordy³ dark blue banner, and you will see a button on the right, in the panel headed 'OED Online Subscribers', marked Enter OED Online. This is actually the OED publisher's front page, and there is much here that you can read at a later date about the various editions of OED, current developments, and so on. However, press on to hit the Enter OED Online button. You should then see what appears below:

Screenshot of dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl

If you now try to type a word in the Find Word box to start a search you may be taken to the word or you may see a results list giving all the OED entries matching your search term.

4.0. OED Online's Help system

The Help button at the bottom right-hand corner of the window, and in the main screen area just in case you miss it, is worth drawing your attention to at the outset. Clicking on this button brings up a new browser window showing the Help text. You should spend a little time looking into this, possibly starting with the FAQs (frequently asked questions), the answers to which are things every OED user ought to know. When you want to get back to the main OED search page, close or minimize the Help text window.

5. Searching

Searching in OED Online can be done in two ways.

There is a basic search procedure, which assumes you have a word which you wish to look up, as one would with a paper dictionary. This is called a Find Word search and uses the box at the top right or middle of the initial screen, and at the top right of all other screens.

The other type of search is a full text search, offering many more ways of searching. This can be started by clicking on the Simple Search tab at the bottom left-hand corner of the window, or, for even more options, by choosing the Advanced Search tab. This type of search is covered later, starting in ‘Using the Simple Search button for more sophisticated searches’.

6. ‘Find Word’ searching

Look up the word strive. This will introduce you to the following features of the OED:

How to look at information about pronunciation, spellings, etymology, quotations and the date chart
The ordering and layout of senses in a typical, fairly simple, entry

The linguistic point of this example is to see if the OED can help to throw light on the usage of this verb in the Past Participle, where modern speakers sometimes want to say striven and sometimes strived. What would you use if required to put this verb in the past tense, strove or strived? Asking a group of students in class usually gets a minority for the former and a majority for the latter. But can the OED help us disentangle the history of this verb?

Type strive in the Find Word box and click to start the search.

6.0. The entry display

As there is a singe result, you will be taken at once to the entry, and you will then see:

Screenshot of the entry for strive (verb)

By default this kind of search displays the headword, the start of the sequence of sense definitions and the quotations to illustrate the sense which comes first.

An important point about the OED will be apparent at once. The first sense that appears is not the sense in common use today, but a possibly defunct one (the ? Obs. tells us that). This is a reminder that the dictionary orders the sense definitions on broadly historical lines - earliest first.

Look at the row of buttons across the top of the screen and click on each in turn:

Pronunciation brings up the pronunciation of the headword in IPA transcription. (This material can be searched using the Advanced Search.)

Spellings brings up a long list of various spellings from many periods, including lots which are not current. You will be able to see whether anything like the forms strived, strove and striven have existed at any time.

Etymology brings up information about the sources of the word.

Quotations is in red, to show that it is already active. Clicking Quotations will turn the quotations off.

Before using Date Chart, scroll down using the right hand scroll bar to see later definitions and quotations. You will find that this word has quite a long list of definitions, many of them for dead usages.

Now click the Date Chart button. It adds a time-line in front of each set of quotations to show how the dates of the various quotations are spread through history. One should be able to see from this if there is a thick clustering of citations at a particular date, and also if the dates continue up to the present or near-present (bearing in mind that many entries were completed between 1884 and 1928). One can get an impression here of the period within which a particular sense of a word might have been available.

6.1. Entry Map

At the bottom left-hand corner of the window are several buttons. We shall be using most of these later, but it is worth trying one now, the one labelled Entry Map. The screen shown above positions strive v. in an alphabetical sequence of words on the left of the screen. This is known as List by entry order. This allows you to click on a nearby word easily. You might (but don't try it yet!) want to see what on earth strivable means. However, this side frame also allows you to display a ‘map’ of the numbered senses of the word you are looking at. The usefulness of this will be more apparent if we turn off all the buttons showing pronunciation, etc. (even quotations). Just leave the senses showing. Then click on Entry Map and here is what you will see:

Screenshot of 'strive' with entry map displayed

The first five senses now show clearly. The screen shows as far as 3b. But the map at the left tells you that there is further to go. If you scroll down on the right hand scroll bar you will see the later sense definitions. If you want to go direct to a sense, use the links in the Entry Map. Each letter or number takes you at once to one or other of the sense definitions.

This facility is handy is you want to look closely at the organisation of the senses. In a short dictionary the senses will probably be unnumbered. OED editors have clearly put a lot of work into relating senses. For a fuller explanation of this see Berg (1993)⁵. It can be useful when you are looking at a word with a very long list of senses (e.g. drive v.).

For the moment concentrate on the fact that 3b to 3f are all regarded as later developments of sense 3. This means that sense 4 might have come into the language at a date before 3b, c, d, e or f. You will need to turn on the quotations and the Date Chart again to check this. So remember that numbers in an OED list of senses are in historical order, but lettered subsenses may start a separate dating sequence. Thus 3b is an older sense than 3c and so on.

6.2. strived/striven - strove/strived?

Screenshot illustrating 'Find in frame' (Ctrl+F)

So what can we conclude about the parts of this verb? The list of spellings we saw earlier tells you which spellings occur in the citations under the various senses. If you want to look quickly at all the examples of striven, say, then you can just use your browser's Find function (click in the entry frame, then select Find from the Edit menu at the top of the browser window). This will allow you to look at each example of striven in turn. Then do the same for strived and strove.

It becomes clear that all forms have been used. The verb was originally a ‘strong’ one (with forms like strove and striven which undergo alterations of form) but has increasingly come under pressure to regularise and use the form strived.

6.3. Using wildcards

The scope of Find Word searches can be expanded considerably by using wildcard elements in searches. The two wildcard characters are:

* (any number of letters including none)

? (any single letter)

So type in *osis in the Find Word box and up will come more than 600 items in a display which looks like this:

Screenshot of results list for '*osis'

Showing in the window are 10 headwords which match the pattern. You can scroll to the remainder using the More button. If you look top right you will see that you can opt to change the number of items displayed, and personally I find it quicker to go to 100 items per page (remember to click Show to alter the display).

We now have a useful way of searching for English derivational morphology. You should check through at least some of the headwords to see that you are not getting items which only accidentally conform to the pattern. Later we shall explore a way of searching a little more precisely for morphological elements. In the case of this suffix, which is not readily confusable with anything else, around 600 is probably a good estimate of the number of such words in English. Not surprisingly they are mostly scientific terms.

This kind of search proves the worth of the electronic version. You can find out easily how many words in English begin with the prefix hetero- in either the paper or the online version of OED (though the latter does the counting for you), but looking for suffixes can only be done electronically.

7. ‘Find Word’ assignments

Here are some tasks based on the features you have covered so far.

7.0. Linguistics jargon

What can you learn about the history of linguistics terminology using the OED? Try Find Word searches on the list of words below, noting the dates of first use of each word, and any cases where you think the term may be obsolete. In some cases (e.g. accent) the word will have lots of other uses, so you may have to look hard for the linguistic uses.

accent (more than one sense relevant in linguistics)
analogy
dialect
glottology (and glossology)
homonym
linguist (in the sense ‘practitioner of linguistics’)
linguistics
morpheme
philology
phoneme
phonology
synonym

7.1. Spelling choices

Use the OED to find out what you can about the status of -eled and -elled spellings. Standard textbooks tell you that UK English prefers travelled, for example, to US traveled, but how many words does this kind of problem arise in and what does the OED story tell you about whether British usage has always preferred the -elled spelling?

(Doubling of written consonants at the end of verbs is one of the trickier corners of English spelling. If you want to probe further, find out what the OED says about biased/biassed.)

7.2. Use of derivational morphemes

Use the OED to find out how many words in English exist which are built up on the pattern of initial ex-, dis-, and re-, and ending with -ify (e.g. exemplify or reify would match). These are all basic word formation elements, but the OED allows you to check what has been produced using these elements. Be careful to check your lists to see that all the words found truly fit into the patterns.

7.3. Irregular verbs

Look into the forms of the verb dive to see what you can find out about the form dove, usually cited as US usage nowadays.

8. Using the Simple Search button for more sophisticated searches

The Simple Search button opens up various types of more elaborate search. When you do a Find Word search you look up only a list of ‘headwords’, the words on which each dictionary entry is hung. Full Text searching means that you can look for a word in any part of the dictionary in fact in any of the information ‘fields’ in the entries such as the definition text, the quotation text, the etymology and so on. Note that two extra fields, subjects and pronunciations, can be searched via the Advanced Search (accessed by the adjacent tab), which also allows several terms to be linked by Boolean operators, as well as a range of more sophisticated search options.

Starting at the beginning of a session and then pressing the Simple Search button reveals the following screen:

I have opened up the list of possible choices in the second box down on the left. You can look for a word in any of the listed ‘fields’. Most of these are self-explanatory. ‘Full text’ means that every single field is searched. ‘Quotation work’ means that you can search the abbreviated titles of works from which quotations come (e.g. to find out how often a particular book is quoted). This button and its options are what you use if you want to find the maximum number of occurrences of a word in the entire dictionary.

8.0. Investigating grotty

To show the differences between a Find Word search and a Full Text search, do a Find Word search for the word grotty.

You will be taken straight to the headword grotty a. You will find that it is classed as a slang word, and that it is first cited in 1964. The connection to Beatlemania is not brought out as explicitly as it might be, but nevertheless its usage is pretty well illustrated.

Now click on Simple Search and fill in the Search box with grotty and select full text in the menu box below. Then click on Start Search. You will get the following display:

Screenshot showing results list for 'grotty'

Using a term which is not ‘OED-speak’, but commonly used in the database world, you will get at least twenty ‘hits’. The first 10 items in the list of headwords and brief contexts appear in the main bit of the screen. Twenty is a lot better than 1, but do not be over-impressed. No less than eight of these hits turn out to be located in the entry for grotty which you have already read, and two more occur under the word grot, which you might have thought of looking for by scrolling a little higher in the alphabetic listing shown to the left of the entry. However, that still leaves several more occurrences which you can explore by clicking on the links. You will find your knowledge of sixties slang much expanded by the experience! A particularly gorgeous quotation turns up in an extract from a Porridge script - ‘you are a grotty, nurkish git’. It would be harder to find a more telling indication of the contexts in which you might use grotty!

To summarise, using a Full Text search is likely to produce more contexts of use for a word than you will find in the illustrative quotations under just the headword alone. If you are lucky you will get many more. This is something which could only happen by accident in the paper version of the dictionary. Only the availability of an electronic index to pretty well every word in the OED makes this possible, and it increases the usefulness of the electronic dictionary enormously.

At once you will see that you could repeat searches you have already done and get more results. I will leave it to you to do a Full Text search for such forms as strived, striven, strove and dove. You will find what you looked at before, plus other instances scattered throughout the dictionary and occurring in quotations for other headwords.

8.1. Searching the dictionary ‘apparatus’

So far all your searches have involved searching for words, parts of words, etc., which you believe are in the dictionary, but the full power of the Simple Search button is perhaps appreciated if you think about the dictionary's technical language. You need to spend some time looking at how entries are organised in order to appreciate what you can get out of this type of search.

Let us dive in with a question about slang. True, the OED is not a slang dictionary as such, but it contains an enormous amount of information about slang. If you do a Full Text search for slang you will be overwhelmed by over 16,000 hits, which is impossible to deal with, so we shall be more selective.

8.2. Australian slang

Many commentators on English in the last half century have noted the growing importance of Australia as a source of creative usage in English. This is reflected in the considerable presence of Australian slang. So how do we winkle out the Australian slang? First take some time to look up one or two items of Australian slang you know, for example cobber or dinkum. Notice carefully how the items are labelled in the entries. You will soon see that the OED uses both Aust. and Austral. to mark Australian items (one of many such inconsistencies - read the Abbreviations table in Help very carefully!) Look at where the term slang occurs. Does it tend to come just before or just after the national indicator? Once you know what to look for you can start your search. Any ‘let's find out what's in there’ searches should be planned out in this way.

Screenshot showing proximity search for 'slang' near 'aust*'

Click on Simple Search and then on More options. You will find that you can do searches for two items (words or word patterns involving wildcards) at a time at varying distances apart (1 word, 2 words or less, 5 words or less, 10 words or less). Do the search illustrated on the right.

This will pick up over 1000 examples. This is still probably too long a list to look through, but if you scan a sample of the cases which come up you will see that the amount of ‘dross’ (i.e. items which are not really Australian slang) is quite low.

How do you know which field(s) to search for the best results? Experience will give you confidence. I tried the following earlier versions of this search:

Screenshot showing proximity search for 'slang' near 'aust*' in etymologies

You will find that looking in the definition only is quite productive, with over 400 hits, but very well known items such as abo are missed by this search. Looking in the etymologies field only was not very productive, adding only 4 hits.

As you can see, ‘full text’ captures more than any other option, but usually produces more dross.

It is usually safer to look in ‘full text’ mode. There are many inconsistencies in the way data has been entered in OED, reflecting its long production history, so that you cannot count on the information you are seeking being entered precisely the same way every time. A label like ‘slang’ may be placed at the start of an entry, or it may be tied to only one of a series of definitions. Searching only one field may miss items of interest.

9. Assignments using the Search button

You should be able to work out how to perform the following tasks.

9.0. Rhyming slang

You should be able to dig out quite a lot of rhyming slang. Start by looking up entries for titfer and plates of meat. (The last one is a phrase, but just do a Find Word search.) How many rhyming slang expressions did you find? How many of those are in current use?

9.1. English vocabulary from other languages

The OED contains numberless words from French, Latin and Greek, but it is worth looking for some other languages. How far have we absorbed vocabulary from Portuguese and Dutch, languages of great seafaring countries? And what about Malay, Urdu, and other languages which reflect colonial experiences? Start by looking up some words you know are from foreign sources (try mango, rattan, ketchup, weltschmerz or satsuma if you feel stuck at this point) then check carefully in the Abbreviations table (in Help) to get a few language abbreviations which you can then look for. Give a report on the languages and numbers of words you have found. If the number of words is manageable, try to summarise what kind of vocabulary items they are (e.g. relating to business, social life, academic worlds, etc.). Some of the words you find may be marked with a tramline to signify that the word is not (yet) nativized in English according to the OED editors. Watch for this feature and see if you agree.

In relation to words of Indian origin some care is needed. Quite a lot of terms which came through the colonial experience are labelled Anglo-Indian. This term in itself has a complex history and is worth looking up. Often a specific language is indicated as well. Apart from Urdu try Hindi, Hindustani and Marathi.

9.2. Collocational relationships

The words large and big are similar in meaning, but not identical in their distribution in expressions. You all know big deal and large size, but *large deal is not at all OK. Maybe you feel doubtful about big size. We are looking at the collocational patterning of two common size adjectives⁷. The OED can help us find out more about these relationships - with care. The main precaution is that you have to look carefully at the dates of quotations in which you find. Find out whether the OED helps you to verify that big money is an English expression while large money is not. Check out some of the earlier expressions, and think of other common collocates of big or large which you could test out. You should be able to figure out how to use the Search facilities to find evidence.

10. The interrelatedness of definitions and meanings

Lexical semantics teaches students that word meanings can, up to a point, be systematically described. Concepts such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy have been used to describe the ‘sense relations’ which words can enter into⁸. Standard exercises involve students in deciding which of the following are examples of the larger category vehicle: car, train, plane, bicycle, scooter, etc., or in investigating the different kinds of ‘oppositeness’ represented by hot/cold and give/take.

How much of this systematic lexical information is built into a dictionary? These relationships are, after all, important for foreign learners of a language. However, the task of specifying the many interrelationships within the dictionary is so huge that for native speakers most of it is taken for granted. But dictionary definitions have to be written in a form which is compact and dependent on other words in the language. Would you expect, for example, that a dictionary should make it clear that a tulip is a kind of flower, possibly by incorporating the word ‘flower’ in the definition? This is explored in Hurford & Heasley (1983) and they demonstrate that one of the smaller Oxford dictionaries does, in fact, build a certain amount of information into definitions.

Here is an example from Hurford & Heasley (1983 p179) of how you might trace the interconnectedness of definitions in a dictionary. The definition of husband mentions wife and vice versa in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, so an arrow runs each way in the diagram.

Diagram showing relationships between definitions

You might expect that a definition of tulip or daffodil would include the word flower in the definition, thus recognizing the relationship of hyponymy. But does the dictionary actually spell out this information, or does it rely on native speakers already possessing all this knowledge before they use the dictionary?

You can use OED to investigate sense relationships.

10.0. Step 1: Select the lexicon

First, select a not too long list of words. For this example I shall use some ‘human locomotion’ verbs, which is a rich lexical set in English: run, walk, stroll, toddle, trudge, tramp, march will do to start with. The idea is to explore how the more specialised words relate to walk, and to note any other cross references in the definitions.

10.1. Step 2: Identify the relevant senses for each word

Go to each of these verbs in turn and find the relevant sense. This may take a little time, but you are looking for the ‘central’ human locomotion sense. When you find that sense note down the definition. (If you have Word running at the same time, you can copy and paste just the sense into the document.)

10.2. Step 3: Compare the definitions

Find and mark any cross-referring words in the definitions.

10.3. Step 4: Draw a map

Try to draw a ‘map’ like the Hurford & Heasley example to demonstrate where the links between definitions are.

Here is the list of most relevant senses for the wordlist:

march: 1. a. intr. To walk in a military manner with regular and measured tread; of a body of men or troops, to walk in step, to go forward with a regular and uniform movement. Also, to begin to walk in step; to start on a march, to set out from quarters. Also with advbs., as away, forth, forward, off, on, out, past.
run: 1. a. To move the legs quickly (the one foot being lifted before the other is set down) so as to go at a faster pace than walking; to cover the ground, make one's way, rapidly in this manner.
stroll: 2. a. To walk or ramble in a careless, haphazard, or leisurely fashion as inclination directs; often simply to take a walk.
toddle: 2. To walk or run with short unsteady steps, as a child just beginning to walk, an aged or invalid person; also said of a similar walk or run of any animal.
tramp: 1. intr. To tread or walk with a firm, heavy, resonant step; to stamp.
trudge: 1. intr. To walk laboriously, wearily, or without spirit, but steadily and persistently; ‘to jog on; to march heavily on’ (J.). Sometimes merely an undignified equivalent of ‘walk’, ‘go on foot’.
walk: II. intr. To journey, move about, esp. on foot.

In this case, the goal is to see whether the general term walk occurs in the definitions, since they might all be conceived to be different kinds of walking. In fact walk occurs in all definitions (except walk itself) in two forms walk and walking.

run occurs in the definition of toddle.

foot links walk with both run and trudge.

As far as walk itself is concerned, this is defined in terms of move and journey, which link to more general level vocabulary elements.

The relationship to tread needs to be investigated further. It was not in my original list, but it comes up under tramp.

Here is one way of diagrammatizing the relationships:

Diagram showing links between definitions

As you can see there is confirmation of my feeling that the words for special kinds of walking should include walk in the definition. To that extent hyponymous relations are recognised, though without the term being used. But in addition other features of a typical dictionary are used, mainly the occasional uses of (near) synonyms.

The sensible conclusion must be that a dictionary can only informally represent the formal structures which semanticians might want to set up for studying lexical relations.

11. Assignment on tracing sense networks

Now try to investigate a word-set of your own, following the above method. Try the set of words such as fat, plump, chubby, etc., or words for buildings and their parts - roof, wall, etc.

12. Searching for morphological elements again

Does the full Simple Search menu open up other possibilities of looking for morphological elements? To some extent, yes.

This time we will try to look for words containing final -kin. This is a piece of English morphology which has been used to form words with diminutive meanings such as mannikin and munchkin. How many such words are there in English? Are any of them recent? First choose a Find Word search, typing in the pattern *kin. You will end up with a list of over 600 hits, but with quite a lot of dross. You will find quite a lot of compounds with skin, which are irrelevant.

Now try searching for kin in the etymology field using the Simple Search button. The results are many fewer, around 200, and the quality is much better. You may be missing a few examples, because the OED sometimes puts information about morphological structure in the definitions field. In my earlier examples, I compensated by doing a Full Text search, but if you do this with kin you will get lots of dross because the word kin = ‘relatives’ will turn up very frequently.

Once again, note that it would be good to be able to search specifically for -kin or + kin, which OED uses in the etymologies, but the absence of symbol searching renders this impossible.

13. Assignment on morphological elements

Now try looking for words ending in -nik. This suffix came into English from Russian by detachment from the 50s loanword sputnik. The suffix may now have died, but how many words has it helped to create? You will find that the suffix itself has a good entry. First use a Find Word search, then use the Search button and look in fields where this morphological element might be found.

14. Studying meaning changes

The OED is the best source for studying changes of meaning. It is a popular illusion that dictionaries are instruments for creating word meanings, or at any rate for holding the fort against the ‘decay’ of meanings through the careless practices of inattentive speakers. A popular view of language has it that we are all, deep-down, Mrs Malaprops, misunderstanding the ‘true’ meanings of words - or at any rate of the more upmarket words - and causing confusion thereby. The dictionary is therefore seen to be a prescriptive and even a proscriptive instrument, in the same way that a grammar book is thought to contain ‘laws’ of the language which we ought to obey. The OED is particularly likely to be seen as an enforcer of standards rather than as a mere recorder of meanings. Actually, it has in practice to steer a subtle course between these two extremes of recording what actually happens to meanings and trying to provide a guide to lexical usage in standard English. It does not claim to specialize in slang and colloquial usage, though in fact it contains a great of information about these aspects of English.

As mentioned earlier, the original editors planned to make the OED record the history of English vocabulary. In that respect they showed the predominantly historical motivation of many branches of Victorian learning. It can therefore be very useful for finding out about how word meanings have changed and developed.

14.0. The OED and controversial usage - disinterested

If you think that the OED ought to tell users the correct senses of words, then you might like to look at how it deals with one of the words over which arguments often break out - disinterested. Eager defenders of good English claim that this word is widely misused to mean ‘uninterested in’ and therefore condemn uses such as Harry was disinterested in computers. They feel that if the word is ‘allowed’ to be used in this way a meaning distinction is being lost and therefore the language will in some sense be poorer. (Such people feel the same about pairs of words which often cause confusion such as perceptive and percipient. English has a lot of word sets like this.)

To use the OED to throw light on this problem, you will need to look up and read carefully the entries for both uninterested and disinterested (and for a number of related words as well if you have time). You will find that the editors do mention the usage problem - though they distance themselves from the simple-minded view outlined above that disinterested never ought to be allowed to mean ‘uninterested in’. In fact you will find that this confusion about disinterested goes a long way back and the supposedly incorrect (the editors allow the term ‘loose’) meaning is, in fact, the earliest one mentioned! Even more interesting, there is evidence for uninterested at one time having been used to mean ‘not having a financial or other stake in’ - precisely what the usage defenders tell us is the ‘proper’ meaning of disinterested! In other words, you can see that there has been a long-term confusion affecting two words and not just one. If you think about it this is hardly surprising because both un- and dis- are used as negative prefixes in English. Which one becomes combined with a following adjective can be somewhat arbitrary (unhappy, *dishappy, disagreeable, ?unagreeable).

14.1. Sudden change in context

Word meanings do not change very quickly, but sometimes words do seem to alter their usage in a few years. A good example of this is the history of gay, which has undergone rapidly a process of semantic restriction. It has come to be used to mean ‘homosexual’ virtually to the exclusion of older (and for some die-hard speakers still perfectly useful) senses such as ‘bright and cheerful’. The OED gives an indication of how this might have come about. In particular you will see that the now dominant modern sense was, in fact, lurking about probably from the 1930s. There is also evidence that the word has meant ‘loose/immoral’ since the 1660s and been linked to prostitution since the 1820s.

14.2. A word ‘field’

Because dictionaries are organised for alphabetic looking up, with headwords printed in bold type, they tend to encourage another simple-minded view of language, that each word is a unique little island of meaning. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vocabulary is just as much a structured set of relations as the rest of language.

You can get a feel for this if you look up the entries for transport words, a large set of items which underwent enormous changes from the 1820s up to today. I suggest you look at the entries for car, carriage, coach, lorry, train, truck, and van to start with. All of these were words which existed before the modes of transport we now associate them with existed. If you read the citations, you will see how English speakers struggled to find new terms to name the technological innovations which came along first with steam and later with the internal-combustion engine. You will see, for example, that early on we got train by shortening the expression train of carriages, which is how a journalist attempted to describe the strange new sight of the Stockton to Darlington railway. Later on, when motorised transport came in, you will see how innovation in the UK and the USA led to the lorry/truck split in usage. At present, is lorry actually on the way out, to be displaced in the end by US usage?

14.3. Do we really need a thesaurus rather than a dictionary?

By this point we are perhaps pressing on the limits of a dictionary. In order to make sense of the meanings for a set of words, you need to sit with a large piece of paper, with dates in decades down one side, marking in when particular senses emerge for each word in the set. This is not easy for more than a word or two. The other familiar lexical tool is the thesaurus. This is as much misunderstood as the dictionary, being thought of as a place to find ingenious synonyms. The principles of a thesaurus are, however, to show more clearly than a dictionary can how sets of words are related semantically. A historical thesaurus would tell us more, but the huge effort of producing such a description of the vocabulary does not come within the plans of even a big international lexicography publisher as the Oxford University Press. For many years, however, the Glasgow University English Department has been working on a historical thesaurus of some areas of English vocabulary.

15. Assignment in discriminating senses

Try investigating the word fields of film and tank, following the example of train etc. above.

Take some areas of ‘faulty’ usage, e.g. confusions between flaunt and flout, apprise/appraise, parameter/perimeter, and see whether the OED does anything explicitly to clear up confusions of usage.

16. Dates and meanings

The Search button allows you to search for quotation dates by specifying individual dates, or ranges of dates as follows:

1970	1970 only
1970-	From 1970 onwards
-1970	Up to 1970
1970-1980	Between 1970 and 1980

The date or date range is typed into the Search box, and the ‘quotation dates’ field is selected. If you wanted to find all the quotations illustrating usage in the early seventies you might put in 1970-1973. This would bring up around 44,000 quotations.

Screenshot showing proximity search for '197?' before '*osis' in quotations

The search illustrated on the right can be used to find 1970s quotations containing words ending in -osis, but note that the field selected is quotations rather than either ‘quotation dates’ or ‘quotation text’, since only the ‘quotations’ field will contain both items. The use of this field has a couple of consequences:

A wildcard can be used in the date, but date ranges cannot be used (so we can find 1970s quotations with 197?, or 20th-century quotations with 19??, but not quotations from 1970 onwards except by doing separate searches with 198? and 199?).
There could be a small amount of dross in the search results. For example, a match for 197? might not be the date of the quotation - it could be a page number. Similarly, a match for *osis might not occur in the text of the quotation - it could occur in the title of the work being cited.

17. Assignment on quotation dates

Using the method just shown, see if you can find out anything about post-1970 quotations illustrating words ending in -mania and -holic (and any other word parts which you think have been used in creating English lexicon recently).

18. And yet more searches...

There are many more uses the OED could be put to, but the ones I have covered should be more than enough to get you started. Here are one or two more suggestions. For both you will probably need to check the Abbreviations material in Help so that you know exactly what you are looking for.

If you do a quotation author search, you will find out how many times that author is cited as exemplifying a usage. It is not worth looking for Shakespeare, because he is mentioned so many times but you might like to try to look for Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse and John Lennon, each in his way a minor cultural icon of the twentieth century. You might also look to see how often female novelists (e.g. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mary Wollestonecraft-Shelley, Iris Murdoch, etc.) get in as opposed to male ones (Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, etc.).

A variant of this is a quotation work search, to see, for example, whether quality newspapers, (Times, Daily Telegraph (usually cited ‘Daily Tel.’), etc.) have been cited more often than popular ones (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Sun (??!!)).

19. Creating printed and file output

You may want to hold on to bits of what you find in your searches, if only to paste into reports. You must read the licensing conditions very carefully (on the legal notice link at the start of a session) because the legitimate uses of the OED material are limited, but you are allowed to print out material which you find and to save portions of the OED electronically.

19.0. Printing

Do NOT use the browser's Print function first, but the Print button in the bottom right-hand corner of the window. This transforms the normal screen display into a slightly differently structured HTML document which can then be sent to a printer by using the browser's Print function⁹. You can print individual word entries, or lists of hits when you are doing the more complicated searches.

Read the Help material about printing.

19.1. Saving files

Screenshot illustrating 'Save as' (Ctrl+S)

When in the Print viewing state, open up the browser's File menu and select Save As. This will offer the opportunity to save the file to a certain directory. This file could then be incorporated for quoting in a document, but please respect the OED copyright markers.

You will find that you can save as plain text also, if you force the file extension to .txt instead of .htm. This creates a fairly plain text file which might be more useful for incorporating into another document.