Language, linguistics, and lexicography: revising the OED in 2025

Abstract: The lexicographic methods and resources available to editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have been in constant development since the project’s origins in the 19th century. This talk will give an insight into the techniques that today’s editors use in bringing the dictionary up to date, with an overview of the steps taken to transform a 100-year-old entry into one that meets the demands of a modern reader. As well as modernizing definitions and restructuring entries, editors focus on providing good evidence of usage throughout a word’s history, through the series of quotations given for each sense of an entry. There will be a short discussion of the sources of data that OED editors use to complete these tasks, including processed linguistic corpora, historical text collections, and modern databases. The talk will also briefly introduce some other projects at OUP that OED editors contribute to, such as a project to develop new corpus resources for historical English, and the Oxford Word of the Year.