Authority and personality in the<i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>

Brewer, Charlotte

doi:10.1111/j.1467-968x.2005.00154.x

Cited by 40 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In more recent times, scholars have examined the extent to which the OED falls short of its aim to be an unbiased, complete, and accurate historical record of the English lexicon and its usage (e.g. Brewer, 2005Brewer, , 2012Schäfer, 1980;Willinsky, 1994;throughout Mugglestone, 2000athroughout Mugglestone, , 2005. They offer important critical assessments and corrective responses to claims about the objectivity of the dictionary; I would entirely agree that the makers and methods of the first edition of the OED were unable to evade systematic or incidental bias.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Word Factory was wanted’: Organizational objectivity in the making of theOxford English Dictionary

Kistner

2013

Soc Stud Sci

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In its application of the scientific methods, aims of comparative philology, and coordination among thousands of contributors spread around the globe, the production of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a remarkable organizational endeavor and an early model of large-scale collaborative knowledge production. Begun in 1857 and ending in 1928, the story of the dictionary’s making provides not only a glimpse into varied visions of intersubjective science at the time, but also the viable contingencies of their enactment. I argue that in order to smooth coordination among a heterogeneous set of actors, the organization of the dictionary’s production relied on standardized procedure and circuits of corroboration and deliberation. This set of strategies presents an organizational parallel to the procedural techniques and technologies increasingly called upon in the 19th century to mediate scientific observations and negate individual idiosyncrasies. However, the case also shows that appeals to impersonal procedure were rhetorically leveraged to establish legitimacy and attain resources. It can thus provide clues as to why a procedural sense of objectivity became elevated as an epistemic virtue and can also contribute to a more refined understanding of when and why appeals to impersonal procedure trump the trained judgment of expertise.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Word Factory was wanted’: Organizational objectivity in the making of theOxford English Dictionary

Kistner

2013

Soc Stud Sci

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“…Monumental dictionary projects, such as the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Wo ¨rterbuch (1854) and the later Orthographisches Wo ¨rterbuch published by Konrad Duden (1880), the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal or the Oxford English Dictionary (1884Dictionary ( -1928 with its origins in the Philological Society, were all started in the 1800s, and they are key instruments in establishing authority in language and implementing standard language norms. Although works such as the Oxford English Dictionary set out to merely record and scientifically document the language, editors were subject to heavy pressure to also prescribe correct usage and act as guardians for the language, opting for later controversial labels such as 'erroneous' (Brewer 2005). Apart from codifying lexis, such works also serve to delineate which varieties do (and which do not) belong to the standard language.…”

Section: Instruments Of Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Standardization ‘from Above’

Rutten¹,

Vosters²,

Ayres-Bennett³

et al. 2021

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization

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Language standardization 'from above' occurs when language authorities seek to disseminate a standardized variety across a speech and writing community. In the history of many European languages, standardization 'from above' is closely tied to the rise of a standard language ideology in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we take a sociohistorical perspective. We first define the rise of standardization from above, connecting it to changes in eighteenth-century metalinguistic discourse that reflect the changing sociopolitical and language-ideological context (Section 2.2.1). Adopting the Haugen framework, we argue that the crucial aspect of language standardization 'from above' is implementation (Section 2.2.2). In Section 2.3, we describe the sociolinguistic situation in Early and Late Modern times, which can be characterized as a state of diaglossia, with fairly local writing practices on one side of the sociolinguistic continuum, supralocal writing traditions on the other side and a wide spectrum of variation in-between. Standardization 'from above' can be seen as the top-down effort to reorganize this sociolinguistic condition in terms of standard and non-standard. Many different instruments to implement the standard variety can be found in historical settings, and in Section 2.4, we will describe some of the most well-known top-down initiatives, encompassing both private and official language planning activities such as usage guides, academies, professorships in 'national' languages, language laws and educational reforms. Finally, we discuss the issue of effectiveness, whereby we distinguish between discursive effects and linguistic effects (i.e. changing patterns of language use under the influence of standardization 'from above'; Section 2.5). In particular, we discuss a number of theoretical and methodological considerations relevant to analyses of the effectiveness of implementation.We use examples from the Dutch situation and also incorporate examples from other languages, including English, German, French and Spanish, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

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“…28 The application of usage labels in the OED has received considerable commentary over the years. Although general principles were set forth for labeling in OED1 by Murray and reproduced by Simpson and Weiner in OED2, 29 studies have pointed to the inconsistency of the usage of labels in the various OED editions; all labels are not included in the list of abbreviations and signs; and no discussion has been published about the meaning or application of the labels. 30 In the introduction to OED2, Simpson and Weiner themselves remark that '[t]he usage and subject labels should be made fully consistent and modernized' in the future.…”

Section: Totalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 'Forgotten' Language of Middle English Alchemy: Exploring Alchemical Lexis in the MED and the OED

Grund

2013

The Review of English Studies

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Joining recent studies that attempt to re-evaluate the legacy of alchemy, this article explores the recording of alchemical vocabulary from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the MED and the OED. By considering labeling practices in the dictionaries, the alchemical sources that they employ, and principles of inclusion and exclusion, it shows that the dictionaries give only a partial, inconsistent, and sometimes misleading picture of alchemical vocabulary in Middle English. I complement this study of the dictionaries with an investigation of an unedited fifteenth-century codex of alchemical writing, which reveals that numerous alchemical words and meanings remain unrecorded in the MED and OED. In the past two decades, scholars of the history of science have begun to re-evaluate the legacy of alchemy. Reclaiming it from accusations of being thoroughly unscientific or pseudoscientific (judged by modern standards) and from entrenched associations with fraud, the occult, and spiritual betterment, these scholars emphasize the many contributions of alchemy to science, technology, and medicine in the medieval and early modern periods. 1 This reclamation should also be extended to the editing of alchemical texts in English and the study of the English language in those texts. Although numerous alchemical texts from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries attest to the profound interest in alchemical writings and in alchemical experimentation in late medieval and early modern England, they remain largely unedited and unstudied. Because of this lack of attention, we know very little about the strategies used by writers as they struggled to translate texts, adopt and adapt words for concepts never before expressed in English, and shape appropriate scientific discourse. All of these aspects have implications for our knowledge of the larger issues of the development of English scientific prose and the history of the language as a whole. However, alchemy's contributions to the English language have not been completely neglected. In fact, both the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and the Oxford English Dictionary

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Authority and personality in theOxford English Dictionary

Cited by 40 publications

References 11 publications

‘A Word Factory was wanted’: Organizational objectivity in the making of theOxford English Dictionary

‘A Word Factory was wanted’: Organizational objectivity in the making of theOxford English Dictionary

Language Standardization ‘from Above’

The 'Forgotten' Language of Middle English Alchemy: Exploring Alchemical Lexis in the MED and the OED

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