The OED has been well described by
The Times as a 'Scholarly Everest' - but
climbing it has been made very easy via the electronic version. The
electronic OED contains the entire text of the 24 volume printed edition,
with definitions for most of the words in the English language. It also gives
information on their origins, and quotations showing their range of meanings
from the time they entered the language to the present. The electronic OED consists of an installation and a data disk, and a printed
manual.
With the electronic OED you can do anything you can do with the the
multi-volume printed edition, only much more conveniently and faster. You can
also do some things not possible with the printed edition. For example, you can look
for a word anywhere in the full text of the dictionary; look for words near
each other and use wild cards in a search to find several related entries at
once; print out definitons or save them to a file.
Entries can be saved in
HTML format and thence in plain text format. You can also bookmark entries
for later referral.
The data disk has a tutorial and a help file with clear, concise guidance, and the printed manual is equally helpful. A couple of minor, technical niggles. The data disc is encrypted and
watermarked - understandably in view of the value of the data. But it means
that the start-up process is somewhat fiddly while authentication is carried
out.
With the availability of high capacity hard disks it would have been
useful to be able to transfer the data to the hard disk, with consequent
speeding up of the search and display process - but this is not possible.
Finally, an option to save text directly in Word or Rich Text Format would
have been useful.
The electronic OED really is the business as a companion to linguistic and
literary studies. As a recent MA student of the history of the English
language I found it very useful for Middle and Early Modern English and even
for many Old English words which were still extant beyond the starting date
of 1150 for inclusion in the OED. I found it helpful, for example, for
checking on words of Old Norse origin, of which there are over 7,000 and they
can be listed either alphabetically or by year of entry into English.
The OED is equally useful for literary studies. It has been criticised on the grounds
that there is a bias towards entries from the Victorian period in which it
originated. As an OU student doing the MA in literature, currently on A812:
'Poetry and Criticism, 1830-1890', I have no complaints on this score, with
almost 7,000 quotations from Tennyson, 4,500 from the Brownings, and over 300
from Clough, to name but a few!
