Information Today
Volume 17,  Number 5 • May 2000
Oxford English Dictionary Goes Online

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has announced that it has unveiled an online version at http://www.oed.com. On view—in a format developed for easy accessibility—will be the full text of the 20 volume OED with 60 million words describing nearly 750,000 terms accompanied by more than 2.4 million quotations.

New improvements to the Oxford English Dictionary include the following:

John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, said, “Delivering the Oxford English Dictionary online will represent the achievement of a major goal, but this is only part of the story.” More than 300 staff members and advisers are completely revising the dictionary—the first revision since it was originally completed in 1928. The work is being funded by the Oxford University Press, and is scheduled for completion in 2010. Although still in its early stages, Simpson believes that the revision could double the length of the dictionary, increasing the number of words and phrases to more than 1.3 million.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary, London; http://www.oed.com.


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