[Ads-l] OED antedatings -- General Question

[Jesse Sheidlower]

In general, you can assume two somewhat contradictory things:

1. There are hundreds of thousands of updates to OED entries that are
held on paper files or in the yet-unpublished electronic form of the
text. 

2. Older entries that are unrevised probably have not had significant
work done on them.

In other words, there are zillions of updates that you can't see, but
these are very often random updates or corrections, and it's probably
not the case than any given un-updated entry will have been
systematically researched already.

As for what you should do with any updates you find, that's up to you.
The best thing would be send them directly to OED, which will ensure
that OED has them. If you don't do this, you'll be relying on the chance
that OED happens to be monitoring wherever you decide to publish or post
them. But if you want to make your discoveries more widely known, or
want the credit of publishing them, or whatever, by all means, circulate
them as desired.

Jesse Sheidlower

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 01:48:52AM +0100, Robin Hamilton wrote:
> Is there any way of discovering whether updates to OED entries exist, but
> haven't been incorporated in the latest online text?
> 
> I ask, because I've been working on FIB n2 and FIB v2, but wonder whether
> I'm simply re-inventing the wheel.
> 
> Or should I simply go ahead and post to ADS-l?  Or not?  Or what?
> 
> I raise this now, because the two entries as they stand are seriously
> incomplete.
> 
> Robin Hamilton
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org