Pearsall Judy, Hanks Patrick. The New Oxford Dictionary of English

Oxford University Press, 1998. — 2179 p. — ISBN 9780198612636.The New Oxford Dictionary of English is, completely new dictionary, written on new principles. It builds onthe excellence of the lexicographical traditions of scholarship and aalysis of evidence as set down by the Oxford English Dictionary over a qtury ago, but it is also very much a new departure. The New Oxford)ictionary of English is a dictionary of current English and it is inforred by currently available evidence and current thinking about langage and cognition. It is an inventory of the words and meanings a present-day English, both those in actual use and those found in tb literature of the past. The compilers have gone to the heart of the trditional practices of dictionary making and reappraised the princijes on which lexicography is based. In particular, the focus has beeton a different approach to an understanding of ‘meaning’ and howhis relates to the structure, organization, and selection of material fothe dictionary.
Linguists, cognitive scientists, and oters have been developing new techniques for analysing usage and Manning, and the New Oxford Dictionary of English has taken full advanige of these developments. Foremost among them is an emphasis onilentifying what is ‘central and typical’, as distinct from the time-honured search for ‘necessary conditions’ of meaning (i.e. a statement othe conditions that would enable someone to pick out all and only je cases of the term being defined). Past attempts to cover the meamg of all possible uses of a word have tended to lead to a blurred, unicused result, in which the core of the meaning is obscured by mar minor uses. In the New Oxford Dictionary of English, meanings artinked to central norms of usage as observed in the language. The redt is fewer meanings, with sharper, crisper definitions.
The style of definition adopted for thNew Oxford Dictionary of English aims in part to account for the diamism, imaginativeness, and flexibility of ordinary usage. The New kford Dictionary of English records and explains all normal meanings id uses of all well-attested words, but also illustrates transferred, figutive, and derivative meanings, in so far as these are conventional witn the language. The layout and organization of each eny in the dictionary reflect this new approach to meaning. Each entryas at least one core meaning, to which a number of subsenses, logidy connected to it, may be attached. The text design is open and acceple, making it easy to find the core meanings and so to navigate the ety as a whole. At the heart of the dictionary lies the evénce. This evidence forms the basis for everything which we, as lexigraphers, are able to say about the language and the words withirt. In particular, the large body of texts collected together on line as ¢ British National Corpus gives, with its 100 million words, a seleon of real, modern, and everyday language, equivalent to an ordinary person’s reading over ten years or more. Using computational tools to analyse the data in the British National Corpus and other corpora, the editors have been able to look at the behaviour of each word in detail in its natural contexts, and so to build up a picture for every word in the dictionary.
Corpus analysis has been complemented by analysis of other types of evidence: the New Oxford Dictionary of English makes extensive use of the citation database of the Oxford Reading Programme, a collection of citations (currently standing at over 40 million words and growing at a rate of about 4.5 million words a year) taken from a var- iety of sources from all the English-speaking countries of the world. In addition, a specially commissioned reading programme has targeted previously neglected specialist fields as diverse as computing, complementary medicine, antique collecting, and winter sports. Other research includes a detailed and comprehensive survey of plants and animals throughout the world, resulting in the inclusion of hundreds of entries not in any other one-volume dictionary.
The general approach to defining in the New Oxford Dictionary of English has particular application for specialist vocabulary. Here, in the context of dealing with highly technical information which may be unfamiliar to the non-specialist reader, the focus on clarity of expression is of great importance. Avoidance of over-technical terminology and an emphasis on explaining and describing as well as defining are balanced by the need to maintain a high level of technical information and accuracy. In many cases, additional technical information is presented separately in an easily recognizable alternative format.
The New Oxford Dictionary of English views the language from the perspective that English is a world language. A network of consultants throughout the English-speaking world has enabled us to ensure excellent coverage of world English, from Canada and the US to the Caribbean, India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. We have been indebted to the opportunities provided for communication by the Internet; lively discussions by e-mail across the oceans have formed an everyday part of the dictionary-making process.
Many people have been involved in the preparation of this dictionary, and thanks are due to them all. Those not listed on the separate credits page who deserve special mention include: Valerie Grundy, for her contribution as managing editor during the early stages of the project; Nigel Clifford, for research in special subjects; Fred McDonald, for work on word histories; Sue Atkins, Bob Allen, and Rosamund Moon, for their contributions during the early development of the project; Judith Scott, for assistance with foreign pronunciations; and David Munro, for assistance in updating place-name entries.