Mashable: The Next “Oxford English Dictionary” Could Be Online-Only
Bad news for everyone out there who was eager to hold the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (that exceedingly portable 20-volume set of wordy goodness): Thanks to the rise of the Internet, the next OED will probably be online-only.
Granted, OED3 is still about a decade in the making (according to The Telegraph, a team of 80 lexicographers have been working on it for the past 21 years), but seeing as how the OED has never posted a profit since its inception back in 1879, the move to online-only seems like a long time coming.
The second edition of the dictionary (which came out in 1989) has been online for about 10 years now and garners about 2 million hits per month from subscribers. Add to that a plethora of online dictionary sources, and the stack of books that make up OED3 seems a bit, well, like an unnecessary massacre of trees.
Oxford University Press, which prints the dictionary, will still continue to publish the slimmer Oxford Dictionary of English, however, which should set your mind at ease if you’re one of those folks who likes to keep a giant dictionary on a pedestal in the parlor. …
Leave a Reply