Browse Items (21 total)

The moment the OED was completed in 1928, it was dated. A stopgap supplement was completed five years later, but the language kept evolving. When in 1957 Robert W. Burchfield was charged with bringing the big dictionary up to date, it was thought…

Computers, which were created in the 1940s to produce wartime ballistic firing tables, originally manipulated numbers. But since computational methods had helped to break enemy codes, Cold War resources were poured into computerizing dictionaries in…

For all its virtues, the newly supplemented OED could be a nuisance to use: words might appear in either or both of two separate alphabetical sequences. Burchfield was asked when the two would be merged. “Never,” he told Bryan Garner in July 1979.…

First to market with a standalone electronic dictionary was Lexicon, followed by Craig Electronics. Users could buy bilingual dictionaries on electronic cartridges to translate between English and other languages. Both devices were slow. They had…

In October 1969, the editors of American Heritage sent E.B. White a copy, hoping for an endorsement. He politely declined, but his letter ended cryptically: “I must return to the kitchen now and continue with my preparation of vichyssoise. Yrs, EB…

Born in New Zealand in 1923, Burchfield came to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He became editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957. He later wrote several popular books, including The English Language (1985)…

All the major print dictionaries now have digital versions—Oxford and Merriam-Webster above all—and new born-digital dictionaries range from the raunchy and often hilarious Urban Dictionary to the surprisingly sound scholarship of Wiktionary.…

The OED was digitized to produce the printed OED2, but the invention of the CD-ROM in the mid-1980s made it possible to distribute the entire dictionary to users who could never have afforded (or found room for) 20 heavy volumes. More important, when…