Global News

Tuesday August 31, 2010

They just don't make dictionaries like they used to-though perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. take the monumental and splendiferously fecund pulchritude that is the Oxford English Dictionary as an example. this astonishing linguistic achievement, first appearing in full in 1928, was a bookshelf-breaking set of volumes containing almost half a million words and two million quotations illustrating word usage over the centuries-and a decent chunk of those quotations came from a former US Civil War veteran who eventually savaged his own genitals with a pen (performing an "autopeotomy") while residing in a UK hospital for the criminally insane.

Today, the Oxford University Press, which publishes the work, employs 80 professional lexicographers, none of whom (to the best of our knowledge) have been subjected to a peotomy, "auto" or otherwise. after years of work (the second edition appeared in 1989), they are only 28 percent finished with the third edition.

Unfortunately, no one buys their work in its print form. or perhaps we should say no one buys the complete work apart from some libraries and collectors; abridgments still sell, but dictionaries have increasingly moved online. as the proud owner of a condensed two-volume edition of the OED, I can attest to the fact that hauling the volumes from my groaning shelves and digging out the magnifying glass (!) needed in order to look up a single word of the microscopic type is a burden. Especially when compared to the ease of typing a word into Google. (You can still buy the "compact" OED, now in one volume and with a magnifying loupe, for $400.)

This is too bad, in a way, since the OED is such a treasure-chest for word-lovers and the print editions have always been wonderful for their serendipity (my favorite such unexpected find: "toad-eater"). But digital is clearly the future, and OUP boss Nigel Portwood stirred up controversy this weekend by telling the UK's Sunday Times that "the print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of percent a year." would a third edition actually be printed? "I don't think so."

In a collective lamentation, the world's press reacted as one. Horror! Shock! The inevitable but terrifically sad march of progress! we have lost something infinitely precious (even though I have never used it)! what would Samuel Johnson say? et cetera.

Today, OUP issued an unusual statement to clarify its position. "No decision has yet been made on the format of the third edition," it said. "It is likely to be more than a decade before the full edition is published, and a decision on format will be taken at that point... Demand for online resources is growing but large numbers of people continue to purchase dictionaries in printed form and we have no plans to stop publishing print dictionaries."

No, of course they don't, but will we see another condensed edition with its lovably ridiculous magnifying glass? perhaps not. as for the full 20+ volume version, it might well go the way of the dodo and dinosaur.

Still, "toad-eater" will live on, and the OED has grown beyond its somewhat parochial first-version Englishness to encompass the sprawling diversity of worldwide English. unfortunately, the online OED is subscription only-and that subscription costs a heart-stopping US$295 a year in the Americas. this is progress?