The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on June 22, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp020
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
The Use of Literary Quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary
Hertford College, Oxford
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Abstract |
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The Oxford English Dictionary is a dictionary constructed from its quotations of historical and current-day texts, with the aim of exhibiting the history and development of the English language. The first edition of this dictionary (1884–1928) drew heavily on literary sources, a practice deliberately maintained, though less intensively, by the editor of the twentieth-century supplement, in accordance with the views on the relationship between language and literature expressed by T. S. Eliot. Johnson's dictionary of 1755 was the first monolingual English dictionary to use quotations, and this article identifies similarities between his methods and those of OED, in particular the cultural as well as linguistic consequences of favouring literary quotations. Many questions arise in the use of such sources; these have yet to be discussed by the OED lexicographers themselves. The article presents a preliminary analysis of the treatment of literary writers in the first-ever revision of OED, the third edition currently in preparation, by surveying relative proportions of some male- and female-authored quotations. It also shows how OED3's new lexical scholarship, often based on non-literary sources, is illuminating the vocabulary of W. H. Auden and James Joyce, highly individualistic users of language who were themselves fascinated by words and by dictionaries (including, in the case of Auden, OED itself).