The Oxford English Dictionary is a comprehensive historical dictionary that aims to document the English language in all its varieties from the eleventh century to the present day. OED entries describe the origin, meaning, and history of each word by analyzing evidence of usage from the earliest known to the most recent.
An OED entry is like a biography of a word, with senses ordered chronologically. Each word or sense is illustrated with quotations extracted from all kinds of writing, from medieval manuscripts to social media posts. Currently there are almost 850,000 definitions in the dictionary, and we’re updating or adding around 15,000 definitions each year. It’s a long-term, large-scale project, active since the second half of the 19th century, and it’s a cornerstone of Oxford University Press’s educational mission. The history of a language is also inevitably the history of the people and cultures that use it, and that’s one reason that OED is considered a key research resource by academics and students in many disciplines.
2028 will mark 100 years since the completion of the OED’s first edition. In the run-up to the centenary, the OED team is undertaking a programme of work (called OED100), designed to extend OED’s usefulness, value, and reach. The scope of these projects is wide: updating the dictionary content more dynamically than in the past, extending our coverage of varieties of English worldwide, addressing issues of accessibility and cultural sensitivity, establishing productive communication and collaboration with OED’s users, and building a new platform for the oed.com site.
Why build a new website?
The previous website has many strengths, but to get the very best out of its search features you probably have to understand something about how the dictionary is written and structured. OED entries for words with long and complex histories can be correspondingly long and complex to navigate. We want to make it easier for OED users to find, interpret, and use the information they need.
Works of reference should fulfil the needs of their audience as readily as possible. We want to engage and reward people’s curiosity, not least because it’s the surest way to persuade them to keep coming back. When the OED first went online in 2000 it was one of the first major humanities websites. We took the decision to publish as a work-in-progress, updated every three months. We could update the text much more readily and regularly than we could in print, making new research and scholarship rapidly available to OED users. Full-text searchability of well-structured data offered OED’s readers new and flexible ways to interrogate and analyze the dictionary’s content, and so reveal much wider historical and linguistic vistas than a print dictionary can.
When we first launched the OED online site, we weren’t quite sure what audience we’d find online, but usage grew quickly and steadily. A few years ago an analysis showed that – on average – every second of every day someone somewhere in the world was looking up a word in oed.com, and the vast majority of those people accessing OED from libraries, which play a vital role in providing access to the full content of the OED to researchers, teachers, and other users.
Collaboration is at the centre of our mission with contributions from the academic community fuelling research and development at the OED as we build our offering to better support the evolving needs of scholars in today’s ever-changing research landscape. The comprehensiveness of information and the way it is presented on the OED make it an invaluable resource not only for academic research, but also for teaching, other professional uses, and for those who love and are curious about the English language.
Take a look for yourself
The getting started guides will help you understand and navigate the new OED website.
Quick tour of the OED
Take a tour of the OED in 5 minutes (or so):
Watch this video with subtitles in Simplified Chinese here (on Youku)
