[Ads-l] OT - Not the OED

[Ben Zimmer]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 9:10 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>
> Does anyone have any strong opinions, either positive or negative, about
> the Oxford Dictionary Online?
>
> In the wake of the recent Rabid Twitterstorm, which finally Made It Big
> in America via the Washington Post on 27/1/16, but had already been
> raging in the MSM in the UK, I've been thinking thots about the
> ODO.
>
> Specifically, how useful do listmembers feel it is to provide three
> citations to illustrate a dictionary entry, none of them with any
> indication of date or provenance?
>
> I have other issues, but that for starters.

You actually get three example sentences per *sense* for each entry.
And if you subscribe to ODO premium, you'll get up to 20 example
sentences per sense. Altogether something like two million example
sentences have been incorporated into the entries under the
appropriate senses, a huge effort in word-sense disambiguation (WSD).

Full disclosure: when I was at OUP in the mid-aughts, I oversaw some
of this work. As the ODO is not a historical dictionary like the OED,
there's less of an imperative to supply the date and provenance for
each sentence (though all that information is stored in the back-end
metadata and could conceivably be shared on the front end).
Dictionaries take differing approaches to this, of course.
Merriam-Webster Unabridged, for instance, credits the authors of many
example sentences, but generally only notable writers (and without
providing dates). The Shorter Oxford also gives authors but not dates.

--bgz

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