Autographed press photo of John Simpson & Edmund Weiner

Autographed press photo of John Simpson & Edmund Weiner

Courtesy of Oxford University Press.

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. “It can’t be done.” But in the mid-1980s, OUP resolved to do the impossible.  Two of Burchfield’s senior editors, John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, took over the editorship, and Timothy Benbow became project director on the “New OED Project.”

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 106