14 ms·

Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

84 points by f_allwein 9y ago

Myrmornis 9y ago
I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.
- lukev 9y ago
  To be fair what you get with the $295 subscription is the _full_ OED, including all the expanded etymologies, which is 20 volumes and seems to sell for $1000.
  - Nition 9y ago
    I used to use a a bit when I was at University and they had a subscription. Having etymologies for all the words is really interesting. And it's certainly a lot more thorough than the free online dictionaries. Unfortunately it's one of those things where the free version is "good enough", so most people won't pay for the improved version. Especially at $295/yr.
- aethertap 9y ago
  I have the full 20-ish volume print edition, which is fun to peruse sometimes if you have the shelf space for it. I got mine used for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on ebay, so you might check there.
  - coatmatter 9y ago
    I've heard about the existence of the full volume, but to date I don't think I've ever seen nor laid hands on it (if I've seen it, I think I would have remembered browsing it). I have a feeling that most people who speak English as their primary language won't even be aware of its existence. The Encyclopædia Britannica is the only thing I've (slightly) leafed through before I started really getting online. I remember its thin pages and dry reading compared to less formal encyclopedias. I even remember pining over advertisements of the CD/DVD set and thinking about whether it'd be better to connect to the internet at home, or get the DVD of Britannica.
    - twic 9y ago
      My mum has the compact edition, which is the full OED printed in tiny type: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Oxford-English-Dictionary/dp/0198612583 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Oxford-English-Dictionary/d... Yours in mildly wrecked condition for only 23 quid: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Dictionary-COMPLETE-SLIP-CASE-MAGNIFYING/dp/B009M5QPIA/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Dictionary-COMPLETE-SLIP-CA...
- eulevik 9y ago
  Your library may provide access to members. For example, State Library of New South Wales.
  - pm215 9y ago
    Yes. Most UK libraries have a setup so that their members can use the online OED from anywhere on the internet (you just have to enter your library card number). It uses cookies so you don't have to log in every time you want to look up a word, so the user-experience can be very convenient. I have a firefox keyword search shortcut for it.
    - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
      I'm fortunate in that my (US) University has a subscription, but unlucky in that they have a poorly implemented 2-factor authentication for EVERYthing connected to the University, whose cookies disappear after 12 hours.
mmjaa 9y ago
I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Nition 9y ago
  One thing I always wanted was a paper dictionary that excluded the really common words. It'd be a lot faster to look up thaumaturge if I didn't have to sift through the likes of that and the. Take say the 5000 most common words in English and leave them out. Sure on rare occasions you'd look up something that was left out, but that already happens in the other direction (towards rare words) because that and the are taking up space where more difficult words could have been included. Smaller dictionaries often don't have the word I wanted, but do have a ton of words I'd never need to look up.
  - my_first_acct 9y ago
    According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set". [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with-most-meanings https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...
    - Nition 9y ago
      And I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.
drb91 9y ago
I’d pay hundreds of dollars for a version of OED that shipped in a well-defined sqlite database. I’d even pay for updates.
- SomeHacker44 9y ago
  I agree. I would love a standalone app (Mac, iOS) which did not require offline access, even if it was multiple gigabytes. There was an old OED 2e app for the Mac with the full content.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    The standalone offline concise version includes updates, has 1/3 of the OED and is 128MB on iOS.
- Barjak 9y ago
  I just published a repository that de-obfuscates the archive from OED's Windows CD-ROM version. I don't know anything about the markup language it uses and I don't know anything about JSON either, but I attempt to parse it and convert it to JSON. Sadly, the archive only contains 300,000 words IIRC. It's just "OED_unpack_tools.py" on github.
walterbell 9y ago
Free Oxford English Dictionary (1888), 15000 searchable page scans in a Windows app, https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 The mobile app for "Shorter OED" has 600K words and costs $30: https://www.mobisystems.com/shorter-oxford-dictionary/ https://www.mobisystems.com/shorter-oxford-dictionary/
- f_allwein 9y ago
  Just to be clear: The Oxford English Dictionary has 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, covering around 300,000 entries. It's quite fun to browse (despite the shortcomings mentioned in the article), so give it a try if you have the chance.
forapurpose 9y ago
There is nothing that compares to the OED if you are serious about knowledge. Knowledge obviously depends heavily on language, but of course language is nebulously defined: The same word means different things to different people and in different places and times. The OED uniquely solves this problem through an unbelievable amount of scholarship into each word's range of meanings, providing incredible breadth and depth, back to the known beginnings of its usage. If you are serious about knowing what something specifically means, it's essential. As one simple example, I find it to be the best source for really grokking mathematical terms by far, and also sometimes the meaning of the 19th century mathematician is different than the usage in 2018.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  > grokking 1. Understand (something) intuitively or by empathy. Origin: 1960s: a word invented by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), American author. I knew the word, but I'm pleased to discover the origin. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grok https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grok
qplex 9y ago
Looking up the definitions of obscure words is one of the tasks where I hardly ever go any further than the very first page of the search engine results. That is I don't even click at the links: the condensated summaries usually contain the definitions (from multiple dictionaries). I'm not sure how this works out for the actual content providers.
forapurpose 9y ago
There's a well-known narrative that before the Internet, for all of human history, information was scarce and humans found ways to adapt; and since the Internet, information has been overwhelming and humans must find different ways to adapt. What is disappointing to me is that, with so many more options, people have not adapted by utilizing only the best information. Anyone can read the best sources (with a major exception; see below), but instead they choose more and more crap and now even actively delegitimize the better sources in favor of propaganda. In other words, why hasn't the vastly increased competition in the marketplace of ideas yielded far superior knowledge? Epistemology should be one of the hottest words and hottest subjects of the day. I hypothesize that it's a failure of the intellectual elite. Instead of spreading their incredible wealth to the world over this new medium, they kept it to themselves behind high paywalls (science journals, OED, JSTOR, etc.). And instead of defending the values of and passion for knowledge and intellect, of the Enlightenment, scholarship, and reason, many I see and talk to adopt the trendy anti-intellectualism, bizarrely undermining their own reason for being. I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world. There are a couple of problems with this. First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words would be better off getting something else, like Merriam-Webster or really anything. The OED is not a good choice for this purpose. Second, a story: I spent a semester studying Chinese in a foreign student program at a Chinese school. Like everybody else, I used Pleco for my dictionary needs. My friends in the class quickly noticed that I was getting much better dictionary value from my installation of Pleco than they were getting from theirs. When one of them asked how I was doing it, I responded "I bought for-pay dictionaries" and they immediately lost interest. There was no need for me to assert that the dictionaries I was using were superior and valuable -- my friends had already come to that conclusion themselves by watching me. They just weren't willing to pay $20 for that additional value.
eschevarria 9y ago
“In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could ‘mansplain’ a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. ‘It’s been deleted since, but we caught it,’ Paton told me, with quiet satisfaction. […] A few days ago, I emailed to see if ‘mansplain’ had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag – further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Paton’s entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted ‘mansplain’ on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.” One Wiktionary contributor did a better job[1] in 2012 by immediately finding the use[2] from May 2008. The OED is more Prestigious and Respectable and Authoritative, but the Wiktionary is more comprehensive, informative, reliable, convenient, useful, also cheaper. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Citations:mansplain&oldid=16992030 https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Citations:manspl... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130518221612/http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1156737.html?thread=179210113#t179210113 https://web.archive.org/web/20130518221612/http://www.journa...
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > One Wiktionary contributor did a better job If we define "better" by speed, then every HN comment is better than every book ever published, and all the blog posts on climate change are better than the scientific research. I find it's the opposite: The things that take longer to publish are usually better.
kragen 9y ago
The OED can not only survive the internet; it will flourish on the internet. We can incorporate the entire thing into Wiktionary, which, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 points out, is already in some ways more comprehensive and reliable. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we have to go back to its first edition, and even the last volume of the first edition might still be in copyright. I announced the project at https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg00130.html https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg001..., bought a copy of the dictionary, and spent a bunch of nights at the archive scanning its volumes. https://old.datahub.io/dataset/oed https://old.datahub.io/dataset/oed talks a bit about the available data halfway through the project. I did eventually scan the whole thing, and since then other people have contributed other scans. So far nobody has OCRed it and imported it wholesale into Wiktionary. At some point I hacked together a web service that would show you the page image for a given word (perhaps after a few tries), but I don't have it running now. https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 seems to be a downloadable program that does something similar. It's really unfortunate that the past century of work at the Oxford University Press will be lost and have to be redone. Such is the price of copyright.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Are you familiar with this scan+index? https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407
  - kragen 9y ago
    I wasn't, no! Which scan did he use? I've added that to my comment.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      There is contact info on his page: http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/ http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/
tardygrad 9y ago
I found The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester to be a fascinating read about James Murray and how he came to write the OED. It is ironic that the definitive book on the English language was compiled by an American, and that he made it while he was incarcerated in an asylum for murder just makes the tale more interesting. Simon Winchester is an excellent storyteller and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is an entertaining and insightful book - highly recommended!
- s3r3nity 9y ago
  If you enjoyed that, I highly recommend Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything," which goes into even more detail on all the historical editors of the OED, and their respective process in approaching the massive project. One of my favorite books I've ever read.
ghostcluster 9y ago
I find Urban Dictionary to be the most fascinating dictionary project in the era of the Internet, and much more contemporaneously useful. By the time a term enters the OED, it's already fairly dry, or the editors are jumping on a bandwagon in an attempt to meme a word into existence for political reasons. Witness the Oxford English Dictoary's 'Word of the Year 2017': youthquake. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2017 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t... Good luck trying to hold onto relevance with stunts like that.
- nasredin 9y ago
  I am so quietly proud of myself. I managed to not learn the definition of that "word of the year". Through all the news articles about their decision, the outrage, I remain in blissful ignorance, content with my superiority over the Steve Buscemis at OED. "How do you do, fellow kids?" Personally I enjoy and visit UD more often than OED.
dogma1138 9y ago
OED is a standard for most of not all English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language classes from as early as the first or second grade world wide (depending on the country) this alone pretty mush keeps it in circulation since it’s essentially a companion text book.
- nkurz 9y ago
  Either you come from somewhere with extraordinarily talented elementary school students, or you are confusing the OED with a different similarly named work, perhaps the something from here https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/? The OED that's being referred to here is a 20+ volume set that costs about a thousand dollars: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-dictionary-9780198611868?cc=us&lang=en https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-d.... University libraries will probably have a copy or two, and I suppose some high school (9th-12th grade) libraries might have a single rarely consulted set, but I'm doubtful any elementary schools in the US have one. The best evidence I can give for its exclusiveness might be the link on the front page of the official OED site http://www.oed.com http://www.oed.com to the information about the print edition: http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/ http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/. It goes to a page not found. Rather than being a standard companion book, apparently so few copies of this are sold that no one has bothered to fix the broken link!
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    I didn’t realize that this is only about the full “encyclopedia britanica” version of the OED but Oxford has multiple editions of OED like OED for schools and OED for advanced learners which most students around the world use. http://www.oed.com/staticfiles/oedtoday2/oxford_and_the_dictionary.pdf http://www.oed.com/staticfiles/oedtoday2/oxford_and_the_dict...
zie 9y ago
Not about the OED really, but my favorite dictionary resources: https://www.waywordradio.org/resources/#dictionaries https://www.waywordradio.org/resources/#dictionaries and the double-tongued dictionary is fun: https://www.waywordradio.org/dictionary-listing/ https://www.waywordradio.org/dictionary-listing/

84 points by f_allwein 9y ago

I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.

lukev 9y ago
To be fair what you get with the $295 subscription is the _full_ OED, including all the expanded etymologies, which is 20 volumes and seems to sell for $1000.
- Nition 9y ago
  I used to use a a bit when I was at University and they had a subscription. Having etymologies for all the words is really interesting. And it's certainly a lot more thorough than the free online dictionaries. Unfortunately it's one of those things where the free version is "good enough", so most people won't pay for the improved version. Especially at $295/yr.
aethertap 9y ago
I have the full 20-ish volume print edition, which is fun to peruse sometimes if you have the shelf space for it. I got mine used for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on ebay, so you might check there.
- coatmatter 9y ago
  I've heard about the existence of the full volume, but to date I don't think I've ever seen nor laid hands on it (if I've seen it, I think I would have remembered browsing it). I have a feeling that most people who speak English as their primary language won't even be aware of its existence. The Encyclopædia Britannica is the only thing I've (slightly) leafed through before I started really getting online. I remember its thin pages and dry reading compared to less formal encyclopedias. I even remember pining over advertisements of the CD/DVD set and thinking about whether it'd be better to connect to the internet at home, or get the DVD of Britannica.
  - twic 9y ago
    My mum has the compact edition, which is the full OED printed in tiny type: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Oxford-English-Dictionary/dp/0198612583 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Oxford-English-Dictionary/d... Yours in mildly wrecked condition for only 23 quid: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Dictionary-COMPLETE-SLIP-CASE-MAGNIFYING/dp/B009M5QPIA/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Dictionary-COMPLETE-SLIP-CA...
eulevik 9y ago
Your library may provide access to members. For example, State Library of New South Wales.
- pm215 9y ago
  Yes. Most UK libraries have a setup so that their members can use the online OED from anywhere on the internet (you just have to enter your library card number). It uses cookies so you don't have to log in every time you want to look up a word, so the user-experience can be very convenient. I have a firefox keyword search shortcut for it.
  - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
    I'm fortunate in that my (US) University has a subscription, but unlucky in that they have a poorly implemented 2-factor authentication for EVERYthing connected to the University, whose cookies disappear after 12 hours.

mmjaa 9y ago

I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Nition 9y ago
One thing I always wanted was a paper dictionary that excluded the really common words. It'd be a lot faster to look up thaumaturge if I didn't have to sift through the likes of that and the. Take say the 5000 most common words in English and leave them out. Sure on rare occasions you'd look up something that was left out, but that already happens in the other direction (towards rare words) because that and the are taking up space where more difficult words could have been included. Smaller dictionaries often don't have the word I wanted, but do have a ton of words I'd never need to look up.
- my_first_acct 9y ago
  According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set". [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with-most-meanings https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...
  - Nition 9y ago
    And I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.

drb91 9y ago

I’d pay hundreds of dollars for a version of OED that shipped in a well-defined sqlite database. I’d even pay for updates.

SomeHacker44 9y ago
I agree. I would love a standalone app (Mac, iOS) which did not require offline access, even if it was multiple gigabytes. There was an old OED 2e app for the Mac with the full content.
- walterbell 9y ago
  The standalone offline concise version includes updates, has 1/3 of the OED and is 128MB on iOS.
Barjak 9y ago
I just published a repository that de-obfuscates the archive from OED's Windows CD-ROM version. I don't know anything about the markup language it uses and I don't know anything about JSON either, but I attempt to parse it and convert it to JSON. Sadly, the archive only contains 300,000 words IIRC. It's just "OED_unpack_tools.py" on github.

walterbell 9y ago

Free Oxford English Dictionary (1888), 15000 searchable page scans in a Windows app, https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 The mobile app for "Shorter OED" has 600K words and costs $30: https://www.mobisystems.com/shorter-oxford-dictionary/ https://www.mobisystems.com/shorter-oxford-dictionary/

f_allwein 9y ago
Just to be clear: The Oxford English Dictionary has 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, covering around 300,000 entries. It's quite fun to browse (despite the shortcomings mentioned in the article), so give it a try if you have the chance.

forapurpose 9y ago

There is nothing that compares to the OED if you are serious about knowledge. Knowledge obviously depends heavily on language, but of course language is nebulously defined: The same word means different things to different people and in different places and times. The OED uniquely solves this problem through an unbelievable amount of scholarship into each word's range of meanings, providing incredible breadth and depth, back to the known beginnings of its usage. If you are serious about knowing what something specifically means, it's essential. As one simple example, I find it to be the best source for really grokking mathematical terms by far, and also sometimes the meaning of the 19th century mathematician is different than the usage in 2018.

Symbiote 9y ago
> grokking 1. Understand (something) intuitively or by empathy. Origin: 1960s: a word invented by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), American author. I knew the word, but I'm pleased to discover the origin. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grok https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grok

qplex 9y ago

Looking up the definitions of obscure words is one of the tasks where I hardly ever go any further than the very first page of the search engine results. That is I don't even click at the links: the condensated summaries usually contain the definitions (from multiple dictionaries). I'm not sure how this works out for the actual content providers.

forapurpose 9y ago

There's a well-known narrative that before the Internet, for all of human history, information was scarce and humans found ways to adapt; and since the Internet, information has been overwhelming and humans must find different ways to adapt. What is disappointing to me is that, with so many more options, people have not adapted by utilizing only the best information. Anyone can read the best sources (with a major exception; see below), but instead they choose more and more crap and now even actively delegitimize the better sources in favor of propaganda. In other words, why hasn't the vastly increased competition in the marketplace of ideas yielded far superior knowledge? Epistemology should be one of the hottest words and hottest subjects of the day. I hypothesize that it's a failure of the intellectual elite. Instead of spreading their incredible wealth to the world over this new medium, they kept it to themselves behind high paywalls (science journals, OED, JSTOR, etc.). And instead of defending the values of and passion for knowledge and intellect, of the Enlightenment, scholarship, and reason, many I see and talk to adopt the trendy anti-intellectualism, bizarrely undermining their own reason for being. I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world.

thaumasiotes 9y ago
> I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world. There are a couple of problems with this. First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words would be better off getting something else, like Merriam-Webster or really anything. The OED is not a good choice for this purpose. Second, a story: I spent a semester studying Chinese in a foreign student program at a Chinese school. Like everybody else, I used Pleco for my dictionary needs. My friends in the class quickly noticed that I was getting much better dictionary value from my installation of Pleco than they were getting from theirs. When one of them asked how I was doing it, I responded "I bought for-pay dictionaries" and they immediately lost interest. There was no need for me to assert that the dictionaries I was using were superior and valuable -- my friends had already come to that conclusion themselves by watching me. They just weren't willing to pay $20 for that additional value.

eschevarria 9y ago

“In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could ‘mansplain’ a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. ‘It’s been deleted since, but we caught it,’ Paton told me, with quiet satisfaction. […] A few days ago, I emailed to see if ‘mansplain’ had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag – further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Paton’s entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted ‘mansplain’ on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.” One Wiktionary contributor did a better job[1] in 2012 by immediately finding the use[2] from May 2008. The OED is more Prestigious and Respectable and Authoritative, but the Wiktionary is more comprehensive, informative, reliable, convenient, useful, also cheaper. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Citations:mansplain&oldid=16992030 https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Citations:manspl... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130518221612/http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1156737.html?thread=179210113#t179210113 https://web.archive.org/web/20130518221612/http://www.journa...

forapurpose 9y ago
> One Wiktionary contributor did a better job If we define "better" by speed, then every HN comment is better than every book ever published, and all the blog posts on climate change are better than the scientific research. I find it's the opposite: The things that take longer to publish are usually better.

kragen 9y ago

The OED can not only survive the internet; it will flourish on the internet. We can incorporate the entire thing into Wiktionary, which, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 points out, is already in some ways more comprehensive and reliable. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we have to go back to its first edition, and even the last volume of the first edition might still be in copyright. I announced the project at https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg00130.html https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg001..., bought a copy of the dictionary, and spent a bunch of nights at the archive scanning its volumes. https://old.datahub.io/dataset/oed https://old.datahub.io/dataset/oed talks a bit about the available data halfway through the project. I did eventually scan the whole thing, and since then other people have contributed other scans. So far nobody has OCRed it and imported it wholesale into Wiktionary. At some point I hacked together a web service that would show you the page image for a given word (perhaps after a few tries), but I don't have it running now. https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 seems to be a downloadable program that does something similar. It's really unfortunate that the past century of work at the Oxford University Press will be lost and have to be redone. Such is the price of copyright.

walterbell 9y ago
Are you familiar with this scan+index? https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407
- kragen 9y ago
  I wasn't, no! Which scan did he use? I've added that to my comment.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    There is contact info on his page: http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/ http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/

tardygrad 9y ago

I found The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester to be a fascinating read about James Murray and how he came to write the OED. It is ironic that the definitive book on the English language was compiled by an American, and that he made it while he was incarcerated in an asylum for murder just makes the tale more interesting. Simon Winchester is an excellent storyteller and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is an entertaining and insightful book - highly recommended!

s3r3nity 9y ago
If you enjoyed that, I highly recommend Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything," which goes into even more detail on all the historical editors of the OED, and their respective process in approaching the massive project. One of my favorite books I've ever read.

ghostcluster 9y ago

I find Urban Dictionary to be the most fascinating dictionary project in the era of the Internet, and much more contemporaneously useful. By the time a term enters the OED, it's already fairly dry, or the editors are jumping on a bandwagon in an attempt to meme a word into existence for political reasons. Witness the Oxford English Dictoary's 'Word of the Year 2017': youthquake. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2017 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t... Good luck trying to hold onto relevance with stunts like that.

nasredin 9y ago
I am so quietly proud of myself. I managed to not learn the definition of that "word of the year". Through all the news articles about their decision, the outrage, I remain in blissful ignorance, content with my superiority over the Steve Buscemis at OED. "How do you do, fellow kids?" Personally I enjoy and visit UD more often than OED.

dogma1138 9y ago

OED is a standard for most of not all English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language classes from as early as the first or second grade world wide (depending on the country) this alone pretty mush keeps it in circulation since it’s essentially a companion text book.

nkurz 9y ago
Either you come from somewhere with extraordinarily talented elementary school students, or you are confusing the OED with a different similarly named work, perhaps the something from here https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/? The OED that's being referred to here is a 20+ volume set that costs about a thousand dollars: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-dictionary-9780198611868?cc=us&lang=en https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-d.... University libraries will probably have a copy or two, and I suppose some high school (9th-12th grade) libraries might have a single rarely consulted set, but I'm doubtful any elementary schools in the US have one. The best evidence I can give for its exclusiveness might be the link on the front page of the official OED site http://www.oed.com http://www.oed.com to the information about the print edition: http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/ http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/. It goes to a page not found. Rather than being a standard companion book, apparently so few copies of this are sold that no one has bothered to fix the broken link!
- dogma1138 9y ago
  I didn’t realize that this is only about the full “encyclopedia britanica” version of the OED but Oxford has multiple editions of OED like OED for schools and OED for advanced learners which most students around the world use. http://www.oed.com/staticfiles/oedtoday2/oxford_and_the_dictionary.pdf http://www.oed.com/staticfiles/oedtoday2/oxford_and_the_dict...

zie 9y ago

Not about the OED really, but my favorite dictionary resources: https://www.waywordradio.org/resources/#dictionaries https://www.waywordradio.org/resources/#dictionaries and the double-tongued dictionary is fun: https://www.waywordradio.org/dictionary-listing/ https://www.waywordradio.org/dictionary-listing/