Gay dictionary, Gay word changes
Dictionary in race to record word changes
24/03/08 02:31 Filed in: World Male
News
A comprehensive but painstakingly slow revision of
the English language is being accelerated because of
the speed with which important words are changing
their meaning. After working through four and a half
letters in 10 years, staff at the Oxford English
Dictionary Online are to focus on "urgent" examples
of transformed terms such as "computer", "genetic"
and "gay".
The decision has been taken in the face of an increasingly pressing queue of commonly used words and the vast new resource of references available on the internet. Staff examining the historical usage of the word "European" have found 13,000 online references from 18th-century texts alone, a haul which it would have been impractical to harvest in the era of searching books and manuscripts.
John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who heads a team of 60 editors on the project, said: "Our team has also become more and more experienced as we go along, in what is the first complete revision of the dictionary since the first edition was published in 1928."
The task began in 1997 with a budget of £34m, starting at the letter M. Online entries showing the original definition and the modern revision have so far been finished as far as the middle of Q.
The first batch of revised words outside the stately alphabetical progression has gone online this month, with users able to see both the 1928 version and the updated definition.
Source: Martin Wainwright, The Guardian (Monday March 24 2008)
The decision has been taken in the face of an increasingly pressing queue of commonly used words and the vast new resource of references available on the internet. Staff examining the historical usage of the word "European" have found 13,000 online references from 18th-century texts alone, a haul which it would have been impractical to harvest in the era of searching books and manuscripts.
John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who heads a team of 60 editors on the project, said: "Our team has also become more and more experienced as we go along, in what is the first complete revision of the dictionary since the first edition was published in 1928."
The task began in 1997 with a budget of £34m, starting at the letter M. Online entries showing the original definition and the modern revision have so far been finished as far as the middle of Q.
The first batch of revised words outside the stately alphabetical progression has gone online this month, with users able to see both the 1928 version and the updated definition.
Source: Martin Wainwright, The Guardian (Monday March 24 2008)