Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED

Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED

by C Brewer (Author)

Synopsis

The legendary Oxford English Dictionary today contains over 600,000 words and a staggering 2,500,000 quotations to illuminate the meaning and history of those words. A glorious, bursting treasure-house, the OED serves as a guardian of the literary jewels of the past, a testament to the richness of the English language today, and a guarantor of future understanding of the language. In this book, Charlotte Brewer begins her account of the OED at the point where others have stopped, with the publication of the final installment of the first edition in 1928, and carries it through to the metamorphosis of the dictionary into a twenty-first-century electronic medium. Brewer describes the difficulties of keeping the OED up-to-date over time and recounts the recurring debates over finances, treatment of contentious words, public vs. scholarly expectations, proper sources of quotations, and changing editorial practices. With humour and empathy, she portrays the predilections and personalities of the editors, publishers, and assistants who undertook the Sisyphean task of keeping apace with the modern explosion of vocabulary. Utilizing rich archives in Oxford as well as new electronic resources, the author uncovers a history no less complex and fascinating than the Oxford English Dictionary itself.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 09 Nov 2007

ISBN 10: 0300124295
ISBN 13: 9780300124293

Media Reviews
Rich. . . . The OED is a text that has always fascinated me, and in Brewer's hands, it becomes even more interesting. -Michael G. Cornelius, The Bloomsbury Review -- Michael G. Cornelius The Bloomsbury Review (03/01/2008)
Rich. . . . The OED is a text that has always fascinated me, and in Brewer's hands, it becomes even more interesting. --Michael G./i>--Michael G. Cornelius The Bloomsbury Review (03/01/2008)
A fascinating book for anyone interested in the English language in general and fans of the OED in particular. . . . Entertaining and enlightening. --Linda M./i>--Linda M. Davis Technical Communication (11/01/2008)
Author Bio
Charlotte Brewer is a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and CUF lecturer in English at Oxford University. She has published extensively on topics related to the Oxford English Dictionary.