Eighteenth-Century Quotation Searches in the Oxford English Dictionary

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the ways in which we can search the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence about words and their meanings, and about linguistic productivity at different periods in the language. I shall also look at how we may evaluate this evidence when we have uncovered it, and describe some of the findings of a recently established research project, Examining the OED (<http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/oed>), on the OED’s documentation of the eighteenth century. This conference took place at one of the principal homes of English historical linguistics, famous among other things for the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, a major aid in the analysis of various sorts of linguistic phenomena. Its diachronic section is described by its creators as ‘a structured collection of English texts with a time-span of a millennium’. The Oxford English Dictionary can also be seen as a corpus—or rather, a collection of citations—and it is also ‘a structured collection of English texts with a time-span of [roughly] a millennium’. The differences between the two entities are manifold and obvious, but some of them are worth exploring, so as to highlight the matters under discussion: the nature of the evidence in the OED and the conclusions it is legitimate to draw from it. As is well known, the OED began to appear in a series of fascicles in 1884, and was finally completed 44 years later in 1928. From early on, users perceived that this new dictionary had cultural, historical and linguistic authority greatly exceeding that of all its predecessors. In its scope and depth of treatment, and its collection of (nearly) all recorded words in the English language, it implied an enumeration of all known things or concepts, and this comprehensiveness made it seem a microcosm of the world outside. One of its earliest reviewers began his article by quoting Anatole France: ‘A dictionary is the universe in alphabetical order’ (Osborn 1933), while a correspondent to the OED offices, writing of the abridgement of the parent dictionary published in 1933–34 (the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), described how ‘the world seems spread before one and the dictionary’s breadth of view seems to be commensurate with reality…here there is no author’s arbitrary handling of the material of life to irk the reader’ (Smart 1937). The view that the world of words (a popular title for a dictionary from Florio) can or might be ‘commensurate with reality’ is an ancient and contentious one beyond the scope of this paper. Its significance here is that it has led both lexicographers and users of the OED to assume that there is an unproblematic relationship between the dictionary’s sources (in A. France’s terms, the ‘universe’; in Smart’s, ‘the material of life’), as represented in words, and the dictionary’s choice of which of those words to print within its covers. To what extent is it reasonable to say that the OED’s ‘breadth of view [is] commensurate with reality’? Or, to rephrase the question, to what extent was the OED’s choice and representation of its sources impartial and objective? To answer this, we need to know more about those sources and the quotations selected from them. These are matters routinely and explicitly treated in today’s academic corpuses, but this has not been possible, as we shall see, in the case of the OED. Similar observations to those of France and Smart have been made by the OED’s publishers and lexicographers, though the emphasis has varied from one period to another. The press release issued by the publishers in 1928, for example, on the completion of the first edition, claimed that ‘The Oxford [English] Dictionary is the supreme authority…it is a Dictionary not of our English, but of all English: