the new shorter oxford english dictionary 1993

The historical approach of The New Shorter offers a true feel for our rich, subtly textured language. Salinger ('Old Brossard was a bridge fiend, and he started looking around the dorm for a game'). The changing emphasis in the meaning of fiend, for instance, is shown by quotes ranging from Milton ('The Gates.belching outrageous flame.since the Fiend pass'd through') to J.D. Thousands upon thousands of changing meanings are followed through history, illustrated by more than 83,000 quotations, from Ben Franklin to Lord Byron, from Jane Austen to Kazuo Ishiguro. The New Shorter, however, offers something that no competitor can match: the historical, literary approach made justly famous by the OED. Each entry provides all the information you would expect from a leading unabridged dictionary: it identifies each word's various meanings, origins, part of speech, pronunciation (in the International Phonetic Alphabet), and combinations in which the word is often found, as well as cross-references to related words. Not strictly an abridgment of the OED, the New Shorter draws on the OED's ongoing revision as well as its own independent research program. This completely new dictionary covers virtually every word or phrase in use in English-worldwide-since 1700.

Now, Oxford University Press is pleased to announce a landmark new dictionary-The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary-that brings the authority of the Oxford Dictionary Department and the vast scholarship of the OED itself within the reach of individuals. 'For the past sixty-five years, the massive Oxford English Dictionary has offered the last word on the English language. Light general wear to jackets of both volumes. Revised and enlarged thumb-indexed edition. No one knew what he looked like until she found a photograph of him the other day, aged about 19, a good-humoured looking man with dark moustaches.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. And she knows of William Little, the classicist who went deaf and compiled the first edition of the Shorter (1933) virtually single-handedly. She had to teach herself for the most part, and just got on with it. In 1980, when work started in earnest on the New Shorter, she moved to edit that, putting it together with a staff of 25 lexicographers and 25 researchers.ĭoes she feel herself to be in a line of Oxford dictionary makers? She says she knows Bob Burchfield but doesn’t exactly consider him her mentor. Silence would follow.Īt OUP she worked on the H to N supplement of the many-volumed Oxford under the editorship of Robert Burchfield. Ancrene Riwle, she would say, naming a nuns’ devotional manual.

Thirteenth century texts had been an absolute conversation killer at parties. Her interest in words was greater than her desire for a doctorate. She got the job, threw herself into it and abandoned the saints. Then the Oxford Press advertised in the Times Literary Supplement for a lexicographer. She read English at Edinburgh, and then went to Oxford to do a thesis on early Middle English lives of saints. She was the first generation of her family to go to university. There is no tradition of lexicographers in her family her father is an engineer who built factories.

The new shorter oxford english dictionary 1993