i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Several weeks ago, the Oxford University Press conceded that because of the internet, there probably won't be a physical print version of the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7970391/Oxford-English-Dictionary-will-not-be-printed-again.html

OUP started compiling its first dictionary in 1879, which was published in installments over the next several decades. The dictionary's second edition was published in 1989 and had almost a third of a million entries. A team of 80 lexicographers have been working on the third edition for twenty years and expect it won't be finished for another ten. Given how much the internet has changed the publishing industry so far, it's hard to say what it will look like by the time the third edition of the dictionary is complete, but Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, says that the print dictionary market is disappearing by tens of percents each year.

The 202 issue at play here for the future of the OED, and dictionaries in general, hinges on information retrieval, and consequently the inevitable tradeoff between organization and retrieval. No matter how well-structured a classification system the physical, print OED employs beyond its alphabetic format, it's easier for us -- users -- to find the definition of a word by typing it into our web brower or an online dictionary site than to consult the A-Z catalogue of the physical book. We want to spend the least amount of time on retrieval as possible, especially as the internet makes us more and more accustomed to having all manner of information at our fingertips instantaneously. That's not to say organization doesn't matter as much anymore: creating the currently existing online version of the OED was a serious exercise in the organization of digital information (how do you search for "to be or not to be" if those words are all stop words?).

And unlike the print version, the online OED can be endlessly updated. If OUP is freed from the expense of printing the dictionary, what potential is there for the online version? The online dictionary could be much more than a periodically updated repository of words. What if the OED had a blog, contributing in some way to the continual development and evolution of the English language?

One of the first times I remember using a dictionary was when I was probably 7 or 8, playing Scrabble at my grandma's house, and I tried to tack an "S" on her "ANYWAY" to make it plural. She called my bluff, and the dog-eared pocket dictionary on her desk confirmed it. So sure, when Bob uses humongous words in class that I don't understand, I like to be able to define them in a flash online. But I hope one day my kids look up words by paging through a dictionary with their grandma.