5 Relationship to other Oxford dictionariesĪs a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use.3.4 Completion of first edition and first supplement.The third edition of the dictionary most likely will appear only in electronic form the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely that it will ever be printed. The online version has been available since 2000, and by April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988. Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes. In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as twelve volumes with a one-volume supplement. OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY BOOK WORDS FULLIn 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes. Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but it was only in 1884 that it began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world. The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). "It shows we were justified in giving up here for a bit, and asking the world for help," she said.Seven of the twenty volumes of the printed second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) The appeal was opened to the public a week ago, and Hurst is delighted at the interest it has generated – despite the fact that no one has yet tracked down the book. Some of them are just a bit funny," she said. "Some of it sounds ethereal and scholarly poetic, and then suddenly you're down to the ground with an entry like 'lump' – 'I the mattress spread, And equal lay whatever lumps the bed'. "It reads like poetry, it's very flowery," she said, pointing to the citation from Meanderings of Memory for the prefix "re": "O too rebrutalized! oh too bereaved!". "One theory is that it could be pornographic, or in some ways a clandestine publication that didn't get recorded in the normal way … I certainly did incline to the hoax theory – people have made quite a lot of effort from time to time to get into the OED, so maybe a 19th-century Oxford man thought he could fool us."īut a member of the public has since found another mention of Meanderings of Memory, in a Sotheby's catalogue from 1854, and Hurst is now leaning towards the hypothesis that the book could actually be a very small piece of work, possibly poetry, running to just five to 10 pages. "It really has captured people's imaginations," said Hurst. So staff decided to ask the public for help. "It means, roughly, 'why did my tears please you more, my Philomel?', and Philomela is another name for a nightingale." The book's author, meanwhile, is "Nightlark", she pointed out. "We naturally thought the Latin quotation would be a huge clue it's not a quote from anything," said Hurst. The only evidence for the book's existence the OED could find was an entry in a bookseller's catalogue, which includes the description: "Written and published by a well-known connoisseur with the epigraph 'Cur potius lacrimae tibi mi Philomela placebant?'" "We're not usually completely floored, but this time we're stumped." "That turned into half an hour, and I was no further along the line to solving it – I looked on Google Books, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in short I looked everywhere I could think of and couldn't come up with anything," said Hurst.
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