March 2005 Newsletter

The March 2005 OED Online update includes entries for several words associated with Oxford; Oxbridge, Oxfordian, Oxfordism, Oxonian, and, of course, Oxford itself have been fully revised. The city has been closely linked with the Oxford English Dictionary since 1879. This was the year that the Philological Society of London made an agreement with Oxford University Press allowing James Murray to begin work on a New English Dictionary, as the OED was then known.

Arthur Maling was one of Murray's assistants on the original Dictionary project. As a graduate of Cambridge, an honorary graduate of Oxford, and an Oxford resident for many years, Maling was very much an Oxbridge man. His local knowledge of Oxfordshire is apparent on some of the slips in his handwriting now in the OED archives. He annotated a slip for wick (in the sense meaning ‘farm’) with the comment that ‘Headington Wick is a farm-house between Headington & Elsfield’, so providing evidence of the sense's currency and regional status. In this issue of OED News, Peter Gilliver examines some more of Maling's slips, but focuses on their versos; owing to Maling's habit of recycling scrap paper, these are often just as informative about his life and varied interests as the ‘official’ comments on the fronts of them are about the lemmas on which he was working.

This issue also features an article by Jessica Stevens, who spent some time in April and May 2004 on a work experience placement at the OED. Jessica used her time in Oxford as the basis for her MA project, which eventually extended far beyond the home of the Dictionary, into UK secondary schools. Here, she writes about her investigation into the benefits of increasing the use of OED Online among A level students.

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