Ernest Reid
Staff
Nigel Portwood, chief executive of OUP, told the U.K.’s Sunday Times “The print dictionary market is just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year.” It is not likely that the third edition of the OED will be printed, he added.
A spokesperson from the publishing company later issued an official statement that said “no decision has yet been made on the format of the third edition.”
They clarified that “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.”
Although the fate of the next edition is still in the air, the company will continue to print the Oxford Dictionary of English, a single-volume version of the project.
The OED has never made a profit, but the research for it costs the company millions of dollars a year.
“These are the sort of long-term research projects which will never cover their costs,” said Portwood. “But [they] are something that we choose to do.”
The OED, as a printed book, is a powerful symbol of the English language. It is the definitive physical version of the language we speak and write. The OED was the book that re-placed Samuel Johnson’s dictionary as the gold standard in 1928. If the third edition does not go to print, it will be a major turning point in the history of the language.
Work on the third edition began in 1989. The project is only 28 percent finished and may not be com- pleted for more than a decade. An official decision on format will be made then, the spokesperson said.
The web version at www.oed. com revises and publishes new entries every three months. A new version of the OED Online goes live in December.
Erin McKean, who previously edited the second edition of OED, sees the modern dictionary as an antiquated technology. McKean, also the former editor-in-chief of American Dictionaries at OUP, said that the format has not changed since the 19th century. While computers have sped up her research, the dictionary still remains a product of Victorian design.
The online dictionaries aren’t innovative enough. For McKean, the current OED Online is merely “paper thrown up on the screen.” In a talk at the 2007 TED conference she said “Online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability, you actually take away he one advantage of print, which is serendipity.”
Unlike online versions, the print dictionary is suited for literary wanderlust. Reference books are designed for browsing. You can open a print dictionary and discover words you weren’t looking for, but this experience disappears with online versions.
McKean argues that the next model of the dictionary must transcend paper. There will still be print dictionaries, she said, but they won’t be the dominant form.
She offers her own project wordnik.com as a possible future. A “word- nik” entry integrates definitions, etymolo- gies and pronunciations with multimedia and internet data. Users can track word frequency and usage patterns. Wordnik focuses on the context and usage of words, not their rightness or wrongness. The free website currently has over four billion entries.
These online innovations should be celebrated – but no matter what, they lack the security and respect of the print dictionary. The symbol of the OED is just as important as its content. As a record of our language, the future of the dictionary should not include a Facebook “Like” button. Until researchers complete their work, word-lovers and English majors will just have to wait and see what becomes of the Oxford English Dictionary.
