A team of 80 lexicographers have been working on it for the past 21 years, but the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will never appear in print, its owner has admitted in a report today
Oxford University Press (OUP) has said that the impact of the internet means the latest update to the definitive record of the English language will never be published as a book (or set of books).
Nigel Portwood, chief executive of OUP
The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of percent a year.
The OED will live on online, where it has already been available for a decade and receives two million hits a month. An annual subscription costs £205 (US$217) plus value added tax (VAT). OUP also gets royalty payments from Google, which uses an unbranded Oxford dictionary in its search engine.
Google was added to the dictionary as a verb in 2006, a century after HG Wells, in his novel “The Sleeper Awakes,” first envisaged all literature appearing on screen rather than in books.
The printed dictionary is following illustrated reference books and atlases in being consigned to history. Portwood predicts they have a shelf life of another 30 years at most.
The speed of change that is affecting the publishing industry is because of the impressive sales of ebooks, which for some texts in America are outselling their hardback equivalents.
Incredibly, despite its worldwide reputation, the OED has never made a profit with the continuing research costing several million pounds a year.
These are the sort of long-term research projects which will never cover their costs, but are something that we choose to do, I really do see OUP as the arbiter of the English language because we have control of the OED.
New words are regularly added to the online version of the OED. The requirement that they must be “established” means this year’s crop included such familiar words and terms as awayday, bendy bus, beauty contest and French polishing.
Some critics believe the internet is now the best forum for collecting words. Samuel Jones, head of culture at Demos, the think tank, said:
There is a place for the OED, and it is a good thing it has gone on the internet, but we need something else that allows for different meanings of words. We talk about a robot in the U.K. and expect to see an automaton, but in South Africa it’s a traffic light. Billions of people around the world now use English in a way that does not relate to orthodox forms of the Queen’s English.
Erin McKean, co-founder and chief executive of Wordnik, the online dictionary, said paper was the enemy of words because a print dictionary had to decide which was a “good word” to include:
I want my young son to think of the print dictionary like an eight-track tape, a format that died because it was not useful enough
wat wil I doo nowe?