11–20 of 72 posts
I 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.
For example, State Library of New South Wales.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Oxford-English-Dictionary/d...
Yours in mildly wrecked condition for only 23 quid:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Dictionary-COMPLETE-SLIP-CA...
The mobile app for "Shorter OED" has 600K words and costs $30: https://www.mobisystems.com/shorter-oxford-dictionary/
The OED uniquely solves this problem through an unbelievable amount of scholarship into each word's range of meanings, providing incredible breadth and depth, back to the known beginnings of its usage. If you are serious about knowing what something specifically means, it's essential. As one simple example, I find it to be the best source for really grokking mathematical terms by far, and also sometimes the meaning of the 19th century mathematician is different than the usage in 2018.
That is I don't even click at the links: the condensated summaries usually contain the definitions (from multiple dictionaries).
I'm not sure how this works out for the actual content providers.
Free Oxford English Dictionary (1888), 15000 searchable page scans in a Windows app, https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 The mobile app for "Shorter OED" has 600K words and costs $30: https://www.mobisystems.com/shorter-oxford-dictionary/
What is disappointing to me is that, with so many more options, people have not adapted by utilizing only the best information. Anyone can read the best sources (with a major exception; see below), but instead they choose more and more crap and now even actively delegitimize the better sources in favor of propaganda. In other words, why hasn't the vastly increased competition in the marketplace of ideas yielded far superior knowledge? Epistemology should be one of the hottest words and hottest subjects of the day.
I hypothesize that it's a failure of the intellectual elite. Instead of spreading their incredible wealth to the world over this new medium, they kept it to themselves behind high paywalls (science journals, OED, JSTOR, etc.). And instead of defending the values of and passion for knowledge and intellect, of the Enlightenment, scholarship, and reason, many I see and talk to adopt the trendy anti-intellectualism, bizarrely undermining their own reason for being.
I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world.
[…]
A few days ago, I emailed to see if ‘mansplain’ had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag – further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Paton’s entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted ‘mansplain’ on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.”
One Wiktionary contributor did a better job[1] in 2012 by immediately finding the use[2] from May 2008. The OED is more Prestigious and Respectable and Authoritative, but the Wiktionary is more comprehensive, informative, reliable, convenient, useful, also cheaper.
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Citations:manspl...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130518221612/http://www.journa...
I’d pay hundreds of dollars for a version of OED that shipped in a well-defined sqlite database. I’d even pay for updates.
I’d pay hundreds of dollars for a version of OED that shipped in a well-defined sqlite database. I’d even pay for updates.
I agree. I would love a standalone app (Mac, iOS) which did not require offline access, even if it was multiple gigabytes. There was an old OED 2e app for the Mac with the full content.