Oxford Dictionary of English
Encyclopedia
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
first published in 1998 by Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
. This dictionary is not based on the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
and should not be mistaken for a new or updated version of the OED. It is a completely new dictionary which strives to represent as faithfully as possible the current usage of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
words.
The 2005 edition contains 355,000 words, phrases, and definitions, including biographical references. A 3rd edition was published in August 2010, with some new definitions (such as vuvuzela
Vuvuzela
The vuvuzela , also known as lepatata Mambu , colloquially known in South Africa as "Moerstripper", is a plastic horn, about long, which produces a loud monotone note, typically around B3 . Some models are made in two parts to facilitate storage, and this design also allows pitch variation...
).
It is at present the largest single-volume English-language dictionary published by Oxford.
Editorial principles and practices
The first editor, Judy Pearsal, wrote in the introduction that it is based on a modern understanding of languageLanguage
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
and is derived from a corpus
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...
of contemporary English usage. For example, the editors did not discourage split infinitive
Split infinitive
A split infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive form of a verb....
s, but instead justified their use in some contexts. The dictionary is based on bodies of texts such as the British National Corpus
British National Corpus
The British National Corpus is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. It was compiled as a general corpus in the field of corpus linguistics...
and the citation database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
of the Oxford Reading Programme.
The dictionary "views the language from the perspective that English is a world language". A network of consultants provide extensive coverage of English usage from the US to the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
and New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
.
A more unusual decision was to omit pronunciations of common, everyday words, contrary to the practice of most large dictionaries. The International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
(IPA) is used to present pronunciations which are in turn based on the Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English, Oxford English or BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms...
.
The New Oxford American Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The New Oxford American Dictionary is a single-volume dictionary of American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press....
is the American version of the Oxford Dictionary of English, with substantial editing and uses a diacritical respelling scheme
Pronunciation respelling for English
Pronunciation respelling is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words, in a language, such as English, which does not have a phonemic orthography....
rather than the IPA system.
See also
- Concise Oxford English DictionaryConcise Oxford English DictionaryThe Concise Oxford English Dictionary is probably the best-known of the 'smaller' Oxford dictionaries. The latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary contains over 240,000 entries and 1,728 pages...
(COED) - New Oxford American DictionaryNew Oxford American DictionaryThe New Oxford American Dictionary is a single-volume dictionary of American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press....
(NOAD) - Oxford Advanced Learner's DictionaryOxford Advanced Learner's DictionaryThe first Advanced learner's dictionary was the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, first published 60 years ago. It is the largest English language dictionary from Oxford University Press aimed at a non-native audience...
(OALD) - Oxford English DictionaryOxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
(OED) - Shorter Oxford English DictionaryShorter Oxford English DictionaryThe Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, often abbreviated to SOED, is a scaled-down version of the Oxford English Dictionary . It comprises two volumes rather than the twenty needed for the full second edition of the OED...
(SOED) - Australian Oxford DictionaryAustralian Oxford DictionaryThe Australian Oxford Dictionary, sometimes abbreviated to AOD, is a dictionary of Australian English published by Oxford University Press....
(AOD)
External links
- Oxford University Press
- Oxford Dictionaries Online online version published in 2010
- World Wide Words reviews: New Oxford Dictionary of English edited by Judy Pearsall by Michael Quinion, page created 15 August 1998; last updated 27 May 2000.