Fair use and Brohaugh's English through the Ages

[Stahlke, Herbert F.W.]

I just picked up a used copy of William Brohaugh's English through the Ages (Writer's Digest Books 1998), a peculiar sort of dictionary.  It's essentially a wordlist, about 57,000 words, arranged by time periods of decreasing length:  Old English (to 1150), Middle English, down to centuries for EME, quarter centuries for the 19th c. and decades for the 20th.  Within each period words of organized by topic and chonologically within topic.  A typical entry offers part of speech, brief definition, and date of first recorded use.  It looks like the sort of work that could be produced by programmed searches of the OED on CD, but he makes no mention of the OED.  Even in his one-page "Selected Bibliography" the only standard etymological dictionaries listed are Morris, Room, Weekley, Ayto, Hoad's Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, and The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories.  Only Weekley is given a publication date.  The Library Journal review on Amazon says of this curious book, "An interesting but not essential purchase for larger libraries.? [sic]"  The MLA bib lists no references to the book

This raises a question that our local copyrights specialist has asked me about a project I'm working on.  How does the OED define fair use?

Herb