Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
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Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#2I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#3I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.
To be fair what you get with the $295 subscription is the _full_ OED, including all the expanded etymologies, which is 20 volumes and seems to sell for $1000.
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#4I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#5I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?
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Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#6I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.
I have the full 20-ish volume print edition, which is fun to peruse sometimes if you have the shelf space for it. I got mine used for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on ebay, so you might check there.
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#7I’d pay hundreds of dollars for a version of OED that shipped in a well-defined sqlite database. I’d even pay for updates.
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#8I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.
I have the full 20-ish volume print edition, which is fun to peruse sometimes if you have the shelf space for it. I got mine used for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on ebay, so you might check there.
I've heard about the existence of the full volume, but to date I don't think I've ever seen nor laid hands on it (if I've seen it, I think I would have remembered browsing it). I have a feeling that most people who speak English as their primary language won't even be aware of its existence.
The Encyclopædia Britannica is the only thing I've (slightly) leafed through before I started really getting online. I remember its thin pages and dry reading compared to less formal encyclopedias. I even remember pining over advertisements of the CD/DVD set and thinking about whether it'd be better to connect to the internet at home, or get the DVD of Britannica.
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#9I miss the OED. I consulted it in my parents’ house as a teenager, and ever since I have been too lazy or cheap to acquire a copy, whether paper or otherwise. Basically I want an electronic copy, but $295 annual subscription seems steep compared to the price of paper copies ($50 it looks like). It hardly needs saying that the dictionaries freely available online are not adequate replacements.
To be fair what you get with the $295 subscription is the _full_ OED, including all the expanded etymologies, which is 20 volumes and seems to sell for $1000.
I used to use a a bit when I was at University and they had a subscription. Having etymologies for all the words is really interesting. And it's certainly a lot more thorough than the free online dictionaries.
Unfortunately it's one of those things where the free version is "good enough", so most people won't pay for the improved version. Especially at $295/yr.
Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
#10I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?
One thing I always wanted was a paper dictionary that excluded the really common words. It'd be a lot faster to look up thaumaturge if I didn't have to sift through the likes of that and the. Take say the 5000 most common words in English and leave them out.
Sure on rare occasions you'd look up something that was left out, but that already happens in the other direction (towards rare words) because that and the are taking up space where more difficult words could have been included. Smaller dictionaries often don't have the word I wanted, but do have a ton of words I'd never need to look up.