20-Volume English Set Costs $2,500 : New Oxford Dictionary--Improving on the Ultimate

The uninitiated may understandably wonder what all the fuss is about.

Here’s novelist Anthony Burgess calling it “the greatest publishing event of the century.” It is to be marked by a half-day seminar and lunch at that bluest of blue-blood London hostelries, Claridge’s. The guest list of 250 dignitaries is a literary “Who’s Who.”

All this is to mark the publication next Thursday of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary--the OED2 to the cogniscenti--61 years after the first edition.

Claridge’s for a dictionary? With this kind of build-up you might have expected at least some newly discovered work of Shakespeare. But then, the Oxford English Dictionary is to most other dictionaries what Shakespeare is to a comic book, or Stradivarius to a fiddle.

Admirers say the 20-volume second edition should not even be mentioned in the same breath with the single-volume compendium of words that most of us keep on our bookshelves for help in writing term papers or cheating on crossword puzzles. It’s like comparing a communications satellite with a walkie-talkie.

This dictionary costs $2,500. It represents more than a century of awesome scholarship and has been dubbed no less than “the leading repository for the English language.” But you can also read it for fun.

The Independent newspaper’s Sunday magazine called it “this monumental, indispensable, and slightly eccentric work.”

What makes the Oxford dictionary so special--and so long--are the nearly 2.5 million quotations it uses to illustrate the evolution in meaning and context of each word, from its earliest recorded usage to an appropriate modern example.

Like its less ambitious kin, the dictionary has a pronunciation guide, etymology, and definitions for each word, too. But the quotations put it in a different league by telling the story of a language.

They reveal, for example, that in the 13th Century the word nice meant “ignorant.” It took hundreds of years for it to take on its modern meaning of “pleasant,” passing en route through “foolish,” “over-scrupulous,” and “precise.”

The dictionary’s co-editor, Edmund Weiner described his role as more a historian of language than an arbiter of usage. He doesn’t usually get upset when he hears someone misuse a word, Weiner said in an interview. He gets curious, wondering whether it is just part of the mysterious process by which a language grows.

Words as Actually Used

The dictionary doesn’t judge, either. It records the way words are actually used, even if grammarians and scholars disapprove. It also records their disapproval.

The word fulsome , for example, used to mean “insincere.” But because of confusion with the word “full,” now it is often used when the speaker means “ample” or “generous.” Thus, the “fulsome apology” once deemed hypocritical may now be acceptable, and that reality is duly noted in the dictionary.

One of the 5,000 new words and meanings in the second edition is bad , which means “excellent” in modern American slang.

Other new entries range from “AMEX” and “artsy-fartsy” to “palimony” and “yuppification.” Medicine contributes “acupressure,” “biofeedback,” “brain-dead” and “passive smoking,” while commerce offers “greenmail,” “fast track” and “plastic money.”

Oxford University Press, publisher of both editions of the dictionary, claims that the English language grows by at least 450 words a year. Weiner believes that is a gross underestimate. Either way, it explains why the publisher has been running a losing race with words ever since 1879 when it first signed a contract with Britain’s Philological Society to produce an authoritative dictionary.

Self-Taught Lexicographer

James A. H. Murray, a Scottish grammar school teacher and self-taught lexicographer, became the Oxford dictionary’s first editor with the idea of producing a four-volume dictionary in 10 years. By the time he died 36 years later, in 1915, Murray had carried his project into the T’s. His successors finally finished the 12-volume first edition in 1928, and as staggering an enterprise as it was, it was already far enough out of date that it needed a supplement.

A one-volume supplement in 1933 was followed between 1972 and 1986 by four more. But well before the last supplement had appeared, Weiner, co-editor John Simpson, and their colleagues were hard at work on the completely new edition that debuts March 30.

The new edition includes all the material from the original and the supplements, plus the new words and meanings. The additions, said Weiner, reflect the way in which the language is growing.

There has been an “explosion” in words that were once proprietary, but which have now become “not just proper names, but also items of general culture,” said Weiner. There were only a dozen or so in the first edition, he noted--words like “Vaseline,” “Thermos” and “Hoover.” Among the scores of new such entries in the second edition are “Diner’s Club,” “Visa” and “Fortune 500.” They are the modern equivalent, Weiner said, of the way that the names of geographical locations were once applied to generic carpets, wines, and other artifacts.

“Rambo” rates more words in OED2 than he has spoken in some of his films.

Growth of Acronyms

Acronyms are another growth category--”probably one of the most important changes in word formation in the 20th Century,” according to Weiner. Debuting in the second edition, for example, are “AIDS” (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), “AMEX” (American Express), “PIN” (personal identification number), and “START” (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks).

One of Weiner’s regrets about the new edition is its failure to include another acronym--”DINK” (dual income, no kids). When the editors were compiling the “D” section of the dictionary a couple of years ago, he said, there wasn’t enough evidence that the term would catch on. “It looked like it might be ephemeral.” So it was left out. Now, said Weiner, he’s convinced DINK is “a word of the ‘80s.”

The first edition, some say, was really a dictionary of British English. But to whatever extent that may have been true, it’s much less so in the second edition. Weiner estimated that at least half the new words and meanings in the second edition originated in North America.

“The English language is now really a big federation,” the 38-year-old co-editor commented. And because it has the largest single concentration of native English speakers, North America is where there is the most dynamic change in the language. It may be an extraordinary view for an Englishman, Weiner acknowledged, but “we can’t be Brito-centric and turn our back on the rest of the world.”

Still, the dictionary’s original editor, Murray, would probably be less surprised by the changes in his dictionary than by the changes in the way it is produced. Thanks to computer technology and international cooperation, the new edition required only five years to complete--about one-tenth the time of its predecessor.

Printed in Maine

The new edition was printed by Rand McNally in Maine, and computerized in Florida and Oxford using some remarkable software developed at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada.

Now that the Oxford dictionary is computerized, said Weiner, it will be easier to keep pace with the changing English language. The dictionary will be updated continually, and perhaps more important, an electronic version is expected to be available commercially within two years, opening up an extraordinary range of research and cross-referencing possibilities.

Want to know how many times a particular source is cited? The Waterloo software is able to scan all 59 million words in the new edition and give the answer. It was able to determine in seconds that the Los Angeles Times is cited as the source of a quotation 71 times in the new edition.

The electronic version also includes a “reverse dictionary capability”--it can locate a word if the user feeds in key elements of the definition.

That means the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary may be the answer to the perennial dilemma of the poor speller: How can you check a spelling if you don’t know how the word’s spelled to begin with?

Maybe Burgess is right. More Champagne anyone?