The protean OED, unlocked by computers

Mostly, the reaction to e-reading has fallen into one of two camps: millennial, or apocalyptic.

Yet there is a big middle ground where the creation of Big Data has made fascinating discoveries possible. Take the Oxford English Dictionary, for example:

When the dictionary was first digitised, what kind of studies of it emerged?

The original dictionary was published in 13 huge volumes and it was impossible to study its content systematically. So if you wanted to look at how various sorts of linguistic features (suffixes, spellings, etymologies etc) had developed and changed through time, you’d have to think of a lot of likely words, then look them up one by one – and you would never be sure that you’d got them all. Once the work was digitised, you could identify all the relevant entries – in their hundreds and thousands if need be – with a few keystrokes, and subject them to proper systematic analysis. Obviously, you have to be cautious in interpreting the results and bear in mind the conditions under which the original evidence was gathered.

 You can look at how definitional practices have changed, too, which tells you about the lexicographers – or about changes in culture – as much as about language itself. For example: ‘unnatural’ is an interesting definitional word which appeared in many first-edition entries for homosexual terms. I was really shocked when I found that some of these entries were still there in the second OED (published in 1989), and still on our shelves therefore in today’s current print version of the OED. It’s only since 2010 that they’ve disappeared from the online version – the editors obviously searched for ‘unnatural’ and deleted it!

The digitised OED, then, enables not just linguistic analysis but also the analysis of things and concepts: of ideas or beliefs.

The other fantastic thing you can do with the digitised dictionary is look at relationships between meanings (since meanings of words don’t adhere to alphabetical order at all) – so you can use the dictionary as a historical thesaurus. In fact there is now an Oxford historical thesaurus, which has done just that: it’s taken the original OED and completely rearranged it according to meanings. You can look up ‘family’ and see all the different words for family and the history of those words.

The digitised OED, then, enables not just linguistic analysis but also the analysis ofthings and concepts: of ideas or beliefs.