Printed Oxford English Dictionary is Dying – An Attempt to “Save the Words”

Save the Words

The Second Edition Oxford English Dictionary is a huge dictionary. It takes up 20 volumes, and has a hefty price tag of $1,165. Only 30,000 copies have been sold over the past two decades since its release in 1989. The problem is that people are using online resources more and more. This means that the market for print dictionaries is falling away by larger percentages every year.

The Internet version of the Oxford English Dictionary gets around 2 million visits per month from subscribers who pay almost $300 for a year’s access. The reason that online resources, such as the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, are being used more and more is that it’s a lot easier to type a word into a search box on the computer than it is to grab your magnifying glass and heft a big book onto your lap and search for the word you are looking for in a regular dictionary.

Also, the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary gets updated by editors every 3 months. That means that it stays very nicely up-to-date on modern English in addition to the bunches of obsolete words that also make up the Oxford English Dictionary.

Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, himself isn’t sure that the third edition of the OED will make it into print. Some 80 lexicographers have been working on the third edition OED for the past 21 years and they have about a decade of work left. It could happen that the third edition OED will only make its debut online, however, the publisher has not made up its mind yet.

For the moment, the company’s vast line of other smaller dictionaries, such as the single-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, remain pretty stable in their sales, and it’s unlikely that they will be dumped anytime too soon.

One thing that the people at Oxford, and other word enthusiasts, are worried about is the disappearance of words. The majority of English speakers use only 7,000 words in their communications. There are, however, hundreds of thousands of words and definitions of words that aren’t used. These are gradually disappearing, making our society less and less literate. You might think that knowing a lot of big words is unimportant, however, it’s actually not.

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