In this interview with David Patterson of the Encyclopedia of Life project, Seed Magazine draw a parallel between that project and the creation of the OED:
Seed: Have you looked at the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was another daunting project and an early example of using citizens to get information that experts could never acquire on their own?
DP: I actually have somewhere around here a book about it called The Professor and the Madman. I think that there are a number of things that make the Encyclopedia of Life a tractable project and why this attempt is likely to be successful whereas other attempts have failed — and there have been plenty of other attempts, both on paper and electronically. The capacity to use aggregation technology is one component, so you don’t redo the work of others. Coming up with management of names is critical, because that allows you to integrate the stupid information. But getting community buy-in as contributors, as creators, and as fact checkers is an absolutely essential part. If we fail on that front, I suspect the Encyclopedia of Life would fail.
The Encyclopedia of Life might be even more ambitious than the original OED was, if this mission statement is anything to go by:
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species—that provide the entry points to this vast array of knowledge.
The first edition of the OED, in comparison, had 250,000 entries, and took nearly 40 years to complete. I’m hoping the EOL will manage it a bit more quickly than that.
The OED is also frequently compared to Wikipedia itself:
The Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language (and certainly the greatest reference work ABOUT the English language) found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing (never underestimate the enthusiasm of amateur lexicographers), so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper.
The parallels aren’t perfect: for better or worse, wikis tend to be democratic where the OED is collaborative. But it’s a good reminder of the importance of public participation in finding the evidence used for creating that dictionary.
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I cannot resist a combination of Charles Darwin and the OED so, despite the over-Darwinification of this site lately, I have to point you in the direction of a blog post by Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus, in which he points out that Darwin is the first cited author for 144 different words in that dictionary including (unsurprisingly) natural selection and (more surprisingly) rodeo.
As Zimmer concedes, this number is subject to revision: Darwin didn’t actually coin most of these words, but his is just the first recorded use currently in the dictionary. His status as first cited author for so many words is more of a result of the limited number of publications read for the original OED, rather than any unusual neological ability on his part. Most of these entries could probably easily be antedated with modern databases: for example, it only takes a few seconds on Google Book Search to find an English use of rodeo from 1820, easily beating Darwin’s 1834 quote.
Still, I won’t begrudge the man his 144 words: it is his 200th birthday, after all. Hence, today is either Darwin Day (if you like science) or Academic Freedom Day, (if you like nonsense). Google has decided to commemorate Darwin Day using a special logo:
At least, they have in the UK: the logo in the US is the standard one. Too controversial over there? Update: apparently it is being shown on the US Google as well. Just not for me. How strange.
Finally in Darwin(ish) news, the Open University has a fun but probably entirely inaccurate webapp in which you upload a photo and see how you might look if you devolved to 3.5 million years in the past. Hint: you’d look pretty ugly.
In starting to write a post criticising this BBC story for claiming the OED “officially” defines the word detox in a certain way, I see that in the last few hours this offending adverb has already been removed (the story still appears on Google News with it included). It seems somebody beat me to it.
The reason for this single word officially being such a problem is, there’s nothing “official” about what the OED does: if the usage of the word detox has indeed changed to mean something more general than its current definition, then this would have to be reflected in the word’s entry next time it is revised, whether an individual lexicographer likes the usage or not. That’s why it’s considered a historical, rather than prescriptive, dictionary.
That dictionaries somehow act as arbiters for the meanings and uses of words is one of the most common misconceptions of how dictionaries work. This view is exemplified in Sarah Silverman’s Oxford English Dictionary Word Induction Ceremony, and nicely summarized by Ben Zimmer at the Language Log.
Incidentally, the BBC’s summary of the OED definition of the word (“the removal of toxic substances or qualities”) doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the actual entry as it currently stands (“colloq. abbrev. of DETOXIFICATION; also, a detoxification centre”). Maybe their next correction will be to put the name of the dictionary they actually used?
Despite this, it’s nice to see a story critical of health nonsense get some coverage for a change, thanks to the PR work of the charitable organization Sense about Science, who specialize in this type of debunking. In addition, the discussion around this story has led to a bonus bit of humiliation for the company Detox in a Box, as documented (and created) by Ben Goldacre. Who knows, maybe there will be less poorly researched pseudoscientific nonsense in the media from now on? Oh, hang on…
Pictured is the Oxford English Dictionary Word Induction Ceremony, which was featured on the Sarah Silverman Show this week:
In this week’s episode, Kangamangus, Sarah strives to leave a legacy by creating a popular slang word, ‘Ozay’. While she struggles to get others interested, Brian effortlessly succeeds in the same pursuit with his word, ‘Dot-nose’.
The word dot-nose catches on so quickly that the editor-in-chief of the dictionary (bizarrely, played by Matt Berry of the IT Crowd) decides to fully induct it into the language, which involves the formal ceremony shown above.
Obviously, this sort of ceremony is a familiar sight to somebody who works for the OED; it is of course exactly how words get into the dictionary.
[via Language Log]
As part of the 2008 Manchester Science Festival, I will be giving a talk on Saturday 1 November called Science and the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s taking place at the Museum of Science and Industry (map) in Manchester, and starts at 1:30pm. Please come along! It’s free to enter, and there’s no need to book in advance. Get there early though, as I’m entirely sure that there’s going to be a rush for seats.
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