Grok, fax find way into latest Oxford

Press, 5 April 1989, Page 43

Grok, fax find way into latest Oxford

NZPA-AP Oxford The 5000 additional words in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary say more about the glacial pace of lexicography than the age of the words. There are freshly-minted terms such as AJ.D.S-related, antiquark, fax, filofax and ghetto-blaster; and words or word senses redolent of the 1960 s such as acid, downer, grok and chopper; and jazz-age coinages such as big apple. The second edition reflects more than a century of scholarly labour. It pulls together the 400,000 entries in the first edition, completed between 1879 and 1928, the first supplement in 1933 and the four-volume second supplement compiled over 1972-1986 and the 5000 new entries. John Simpson, the co-editor responsible for new words in the second edition, says he managed to get his entry for Pythonesque, inspired by the satirical lunacies of the comedy troupe, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, on his second try. Nobody objected this time.

Also inducted: acid rain, acupressure, barf, bleeper, creation science, detox, diner’s club, dingbat, duty-free, endangered, EST, fas£ track, foxy, great leap forward, greehmail, lap-top, nose

job, passive smoking, plastic money and Visa. From now on, the 20-volume dictionary will be subject to rapid updating because this edition was prepared on a computer. Oxford University Press hopes to offer it on computer disks by 1991. The computer version will solve the age-old problem of looking up a word you cannot remember. The computer can look for definitions, and much more. The basic work of lexicography, however, is still done on index cards, now numbering more than three million, each containing a quotation found by a paid or volunteer reader to illustrate the use of a word. The method is the same used by James A. H. Murray, the dictionary’s first editor, who took on what was supposed to be a 10-year task in 1879 and had completed to the letter T at his death in 1915. The dictionary surveys English from the middle of the twelfth century, and the research net covered the United States, Australasia, India and the Eng-lish-speaking parts of Africa and the Caribbean. “We regard the O.E.D. as an international dictionary now,” said a coeditor, Edmund Weiner.