Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED

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Yale University Press, 01.01.2007 - 334 Seiten

The legendary Oxford English Dictionary today contains over 600,000 words and a staggering 2,500,000 quotations to illuminate the meaning and history of those words. A glorious, bursting treasure-house, the OED serves as a guardian of the literary jewels of the past, a testament to the richness of the English language today, and a guarantor of future understanding of the language. In this book, Charlotte Brewer begins her account of the OED at the point where others have stopped--the publication of the final installment of the first edition in 1928--and carries it through to the metamorphosis of the dictionary into a twenty-first-century electronic medium.

Brewer describes the difficulties of keeping the OED up to date over time and recounts the recurring debates over finances, treatment of contentious words, public vs. scholarly expectations, proper sources of quotations, and changing editorial practices. With humor and empathy, she portrays the predilections and personalities of the editors, publishers, and assistants who undertook the Sisyphean task of keeping apace with the modern explosion of vocabulary. Utilizing rich archives in Oxford as well as new electronic resources, the author uncovers a history no less complex and fascinating than the Oxford English Dictionary itself.

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Inhalt

Introduction
1
A national monument
2
Celebration
5
The next step?
8
The end of the work or the beginning of a new?
10
Press and Dictionary in 1928
14
Recent history
24
Craigies Wanderlust and plans for a Supplement
27
Supplementation or Revision?
131
Sisams weighty memorandum
136
Search for a permanent editor
146
Burchfields Supplement 1 Producing a Dictionary
152
Initial stages
157
Expansions distractions and delays
166
Burchfields Supplement 2 Editorial Policies and Practice
175
A literary instrument?
184

The Little People
33
Beating the Track of the Alphabet Work on the First Supplement
37
Wyllie arrives
43
Two years to go
50
The bottleneck
52
I see that all things come to an end
55
After the OED
65
Colonel H G Le Mesurier
69
the other Oxford dictionaries
75
Wyllie and the OED Collections
82
The Oxford Latin Dictionary OLD and Wyllies decline
86
Treasurehouse of the Language Role and Function of the OED
95
The OEDs predecessor Dr Johnson
105
Scientific study of language and the OEDs plans for inclusiveness
108
Language and culture
112
Unsifted ore and the indeterminate extent of the English language
115
Practical limits discrimination and prudishness
119
Treasurehouse
122
the raw material of the Dictionary
127
Coda
129
the example of Auden
190
World English
197
Scientific and technical vocabulary
200
Contentious words and uses
203
Coda
210
The New Oxford English Dictionary Project
213
Content and character of OED2
222
the Additions and the CDRoms
229
The electronic OED
233
general
237
Editorial labels and usage notes
244
Quotation sources
249
Coda
255
Examining the OED Note on authors OED website and on electronic searching of OED
258
Glossary
259
Notes
264
Works Cited
302
Index of Words
315
Index
321
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Autoren-Profil (2007)

Charlotte Brewer is a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and CUF lecturer in English at Oxford University. She has published extensively on topics related to the Oxford English Dictionary. She lives in Oxford, England.

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