The definitive record of the English Language

 

It’s time for a shameless bit of publicity. Yes, I am one of the ‘authors’, but I don’t stand to earn cash from this announcement, so I think that technically I’m on the right side of the ACW red line.

I’m sure you use an online dictionary and thesaurus for your writing. Maybe even one ‘powered by Oxford’, though you probably haven’t noticed. But has it ever struck you as odd that the one dictionary that is the ultimate authority on the English language is absent from the internet, hidden away behind a paywall where ordinary people of modest income can’t see it? Yes, I’m talking about the Oxford English Dictionary, with its wealth of information and powerful search capabilities, which up to now, if you didn’t pay the subscription, you needed to have a public library card to use.

But in July this will change. The OED is moving to a new and more powerful website. Its full riches will remain subscription-only (or via library card), but a significant amount of its content will be in front of the paywall, ready to be picked up by web crawlers and hence discoverable through your favourite web browser. I’m pretty sure that this will be popular with anyone who writes seriously, and I hope the peep behind the scenes it provides will encourage some people who’ve got a bit of spare cash to subscribe.

Searching the full OED, if you do subscribe, has many benefits. One that I always think is specially useful is the ability to discover what words were used for particular meanings at a given date. Surely a boon for writers of historical fiction. Again, the inbuilt historical thesaurus provides a treasury of synonyms past and present whose meanings can be instantly checked. Then of course there is the facility to discover what words were first used by favourite authors, and the exploration of word origins in detail. I could go on. I hope you discover the OED online.

Find out more here.