THE PROCESS OF WORDS BEING ENTERED IN A DICTIONARY WORD FORMATION IN ENGLISH Magdalena Soklevska April, 2016

Have you ever wondered… How do words get added to a dictionary? Who decides what words or phrases get added to the dictionary each year?

Oxford University Press has one of the largest and most wide-ranging language research programmes in the world. The most important resources are: the Oxford English Corpus (which consists of entire documents sourced largely from the World Wide Web) The Oxford Reading Programme

The Oxford English Corpus a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language presented in electronic form provides evidence of how language is used in real situations consists of content ranging from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines contains language from all parts of the world – not only from the UK and the United States but also from Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Canada, India, Singapore, and South Africa

Below is a typical way of viewing the results of a search of the corpus, using a display format called KWIC (or ‘key word in context’):

The Oxford Reading Programme recruits voluntary and paid readers, and these readers provide the OED editors with quotations which illustrate how words are used. they read every possible printed medium, and are on the lookout for new words each time they discover a new word they send it to a database from then, each potential new entry is given to an editor who tracks the word’s long time use and popularity

The lexicographers continually monitor the Corpus and the Reading Programme to track new words coming into the language. When they have evidence of a new term being used in a variety of different sources (not just by one writer) it becomes a candidate for inclusion in one of the dictionaries. SELFIE For every new dictionary or online update they assess all the most recent terms that have emerged and select those which they judge to be the most significant or important and those which we think are likely to stand the test of time.

The first edition of the OED was published in instalments between 1884 and 1928, but the process of collecting quotations began in 1857, when the British Philological Society began to recruit volunteer readers for the projected New English Dictionary. The programme was directed first by Herbert Coleridge and then by his successor Frederick Furnivall. The readers who contributed to the programme read extensive written materials to find quotations, but focused almost exclusively on literary texts. James A. H. Murray saw weaknesses in the Philological Society’s treatment of eighteenth century and contemporary writing. He felt that the original Reading Programme focused too heavily on esoteric vocabulary. For instance, readers had collected about 50 examples of the word abusion, but only five examples of the much more widely known and used word, abuse.

In the past, before the help of technology, writing a dictionary was a laborious job. Lexicographers worked from boxes of handwritten paper slips on which were written suggestions for revising existing definitions, adding new entries or senses, or making corrections.