The Sixth Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary provides a complete update of this unique reference work. The Fifth Edition was published in 2002, and reverted to the name Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to emphasize the link between this 2-volume dictionary and the original 20-volume OED. It was the first complete revision of the dictionary, being in fact not so much an overhaul of the existing text as a reabridgement of the OED and its Supplements. The New Shorter was prepared under the editorship of Lesley Brown 1980-1993. The Third Edition (1944) contained an appendix of addenda and corrigenda, and this edition was reprinted several times with corrections and additions, the most significant being in 1973, with enlarged addenda (now running to over 70 pages) and a major revision of all the etymologies. The Second Edition, published in 1936, contained about 3,000 revisions and additions. The First Edition was published in 1933, in two volumes.
He worked on it until his death in 1922, after which the dictionary was completed by H. The first editor, William Little, was appointed in 1902.
It may also be significant that the formidable learning on which the dictionary's prestige depends is British but the technology now required to manage it is American.From the beginning, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was intended to be an abridgement of the full Oxford English Dictionary. Despite its solidity the New Shorter cannot pretend to be more than just one possible printout from a much vaster, perpetually changing and mostly electronic record. Dictionaries were an invention of the encyclopaedic age when the universe was finite and static, when Johnson could intend his work to 'fix' the language for good, and when it was believed that ultimately everything could be known. Perhaps this is to admit that these dates were always a touch fictitious. Where the old Shorter would confidently claim a word was born in 1636 the new gives a vague 'Ml7' for mid-17th century. This fustiness was sometimes part of its charm, but it was becoming like the learned judge who peers over his hornrims to ask counsel what is meant by 'Walkman'.Ī sad change is the dropping of precise dates for first recorded use. The condition of meltdown, nuclear or financial, was undreamt of in its philosophy and it insisted as late as its final 1973 revision that 'bra' was a jocular Americanism not found in general use. It caught up with 'funky' for fashionable but it still thought 'nigger' was no worse than 'colloq. It was remarkable how often it missed the modern sense of a word, even in the clumsily tacked-on Addenda. What the word has come to stand for, through constant reference to a certain pleasing type of woman, is 'plump and comely', which is more the sort of thing I had in mind.įuture generations curious to know exactly how ridiculous their ancestors looked when young will have no trouble finding out what hot pants or loons were, but the ra-ra skirt, though already a prized period detail in novels, will remain forever a tantalising mystery to them, which is a much better fate than it deserves. By association, buxom went on to signify lively or gay. Being from the Old English bugan, to bend, which also gives us 'bow', buxom used to mean obliging or literally pliable, but this is no paperback and it does not come skipping lightly to hand when wanted. In fact the old Shorter was quite tall: its two volumes achieved a slimness and elegance that gave it a fine air of much-in-little, of scholarly encapsulation. THE USE of the comparative term 'shorter', in the original 1933 abridgement of the OED, is supposed to have been a donnish joke, as if the 16-volume dictionary could conceivably have been called short in the first place.