Major Update For OED Science Fiction Project

ColdChrist writes "The Oxford English Dictionary Science Fiction project was last reported on here back in March 2004. The site has been redesigned and relaunched; the biggest change is that the OED's database of citations of SF words is now made (mostly) available via the website. The OED (a nonprofit organization) does not usually make its work available in this way, but OED has agreed to publicly open up this part of its database to acknowledge the great contribution volunteers have made to this project. That means that if you contribute a cite, it's viewable by everyone; see here for more details. Also, quite a few more words are being added from an internal pending list."

Comments

Wiktionary

[PxM]

If Google continues to support Wikipedia or even acquire it, then they might increase the support for Wiktionary. However, the answers.com thing they have set up is pretty nice since it brings a bunch of dictionary and similar references together.

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Re:I think its time for...

[ajna]

This is already here in some sense: search on the query "define [term]" (or "d [term]" on Google SMS, all without the brackets and quotes of course) and you'll get a definition as the first hit assuming you spelled the word correctly.

Re:Oxford?

[jd]

Oxford English Dictionary is printed, IIRC, by the Oxford University Press. British Universities have to walk a very careful line, when it comes to money, as they are considered in the same bracket as "charitable organizations" and "non-profit".

Typically a University publishing house will charge for time, materials and other assorted costs, but not significantly more. Now, when you consider that these places don't have the kind of turnover of, say, Harper-Collins, O'Reilley, Haigue & Hochland, etc, but will need paper and printing systems of comparable or superior quality, it's clear that those costs are going to add up fast.

There's also the matter that nobody cares that much if there's a whole load of typos in a college textbook - students are supposed to know what's meant, but a LOT more people are going to kick up a fuss if there's any typos anywhere in the Complete OED. That means you've got to get a small army of proofreaders. That probably adds to the costs, somewhat.

Re:Oxford?

[Flendon]

I don't see any links to this Jesse character on the OED site. Is this April 1st? Non-profit? OED? The company that sells dictionaries? Curiouser and curiouser.

The homepage of Jesseword has his full name along with a link to the OED staff page http://oed.com/about/staff.html to verify the sites authenticity. Doesn't look like any kind of joke. Conspiracy theories should be better thought out and researched.

Re:The OED is great, but ...

[CaptainAvatar]

The 12 volume reissue was done in 1933, and the main body of the work hasn't changed since then, though they do issue supplements. In short, they've long since recovered their costs, and any income from it is pure profit.

What ARE you talking about? The 2nd Edition was completed in 1989, at a cost of 13 million pounds, and they have been revising it constantly since then. See for yourself.