Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 72 posts

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#31

Post by ghostcluster »

I find Urban Dictionary to be the most fascinating dictionary project in the era of the Internet, and much more contemporaneously useful.

By the time a term enters the OED, it's already fairly dry, or the editors are jumping on a bandwagon in an attempt to meme a word into existence for political reasons. Witness the Oxford English Dictoary's 'Word of the Year 2017': youthquake. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

Good luck trying to hold onto relevance with stunts like that.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#32

Post by shullbitt0r »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #21
forapurpose wrote: post #17

There's a well-known narrative that before the Internet, for all of human history, information was scarce and humans found ways to adapt; and since the Internet, information has been overwhelming and humans must find different ways to adapt. 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 exc…

> 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. There are a couple of problems with this. First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words wo…

Because that's cheating! I'm half kidding but you are arguing about price, mainly. Not why the cheaper (free?) content is lacking. You could also just afford a personal teacher and taken to the extreme, a personal translator so you wouldn't need to learn the language at all, which would be cheating. Except that you might have a personal desire to speak the language. What's the problem with Chinese that free offerings are inferior?

It is just chaotic is all I could infer from a first look. I mean English can be pretty messy already and maybe a specific Chinese dialect will be more regular than the bigger picture of the whole language. It's not that your coeds were being cheap, perhaps, it could just be disappointment for something as basic to cost anything at all, and relieve that it's not their personal shortcoming, but just an externalized advantage. You seem to say not even $20 was low enough, have I got that right at least?

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#33

Post by nasredin »

ghostcluster wrote: post #31

I find Urban Dictionary to be the most fascinating dictionary project in the era of the Internet, and much more contemporaneously useful. By the time a term enters the OED, it's already fairly dry, or the editors are jumping on a bandwagon in an attempt to meme a word into existence for political reasons. Witness the Oxford English Dictoary's 'Word of the Year 2017': youthquake. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word…

I am so quietly proud of myself.

I managed to not learn the definition of that "word of the year". Through all the news articles about their decision, the outrage, I remain in blissful ignorance, content with my superiority over the Steve Buscemis at OED.

"How do you do, fellow kids?"

Personally I enjoy and visit UD more often than OED.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#34

Post by walterbell »

kragen wrote: post #27
walterbell wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with this scan+index? https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407

I wasn't, no! Which scan did he use? I've added that to my comment.

There is contact info on his page: http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#35

Post by my_first_acct »

Nition wrote: post #10
mmjaa wrote: post #4

I'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…

According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set".

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#36

Post by s3r3nity »

tardygrad wrote: post #30

I found The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester to be a fascinating read about James Murray and how he came to write the OED. It is ironic that the definitive book on the English language was compiled by an American, and that he made it while he was incarcerated in an asylum for murder just makes the tale more interesting. Simon Winchester is an excellent storyteller and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is an entertai…

If you enjoyed that, I highly recommend Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything," which goes into even more detail on all the historical editors of the OED, and their respective process in approaching the massive project. One of my favorite books I've ever read.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#37

Post by Nition »

my_first_acct wrote: post #35
Nition wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set". [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...

And I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#38

Post by dogma1138 »

OED is a standard for most of not all English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language classes from as early as the first or second grade world wide (depending on the country) this alone pretty mush keeps it in circulation since it’s essentially a companion text book.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#39

Post by nkurz »

dogma1138 wrote: post #38

OED is a standard for most of not all English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language classes from as early as the first or second grade world wide (depending on the country) this alone pretty mush keeps it in circulation since it’s essentially a companion text book.

Either you come from somewhere with extraordinarily talented elementary school students, or you are confusing the OED with a different similarly named work, perhaps the something from here https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/?

The OED that's being referred to here is a 20+ volume set that costs about a thousand dollars: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-d.... University libraries will probably have a copy or two, and I suppose some high school (9th-12th grade) libraries might have a single rarely consulted set, but I'm doubtful any elementary schools in the US have one.

The best evidence I can give for its exclusiveness might be the link on the front page of the official OED site http://www.oed.com to the information about the print edition: http://public.oed.com/about/the-oed-in-print-and-on-cd-rom/. It goes to a page not found. Rather than being a standard companion book, apparently so few copies of this are sold that no one has bothered to fix the broken link!

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#40

Post by KMag »

shullbitt0r wrote: post #32
thaumasiotes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are a couple of problems with this. First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words wo…

Because that's cheating! I'm half kidding but you are arguing about price, mainly. Not why the cheaper (free?) content is lacking. You could also just afford a personal teacher and taken to the extreme, a personal translator so you wouldn't need to learn the language at all, which would be cheating. Except that you might have a personal desire to speak the language. What's the problem with Chinese that free offerings…

> Maybe a specific Chinese dialect will be more regular than the bigger picture of the whole language.

Standard written Chinese is based on the grammar of spoken Mandarin. If someone mentions a Chinese dictionary without mentioning a particular dialect, they're almost certainly referring to Standard Written Chinese (essentially Mandarin).

Also, Chinese is less a single language than the Romance languages are a single language. The more far-flung dialects share less in common than, say Italian and Spanish. If Portugal were a province of Spain, Portuguese would probably be considered a dialect of Spanish. As my Linguistics professor used to say, "A language is a dialect with an army." One rarely deals with "the whole Chinese language", if by that you mean the union of all of the dialects. That would be like dealing simultaneously with Romanian, Portuguese, Romansh, French, Italian and Spanish as a single entity.

Post reply on HN