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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."
Google Dictionary. Coming soon from a Google Labs near you. With all the dictionaries out there, Urbandictionary, Technical dictionaries, Oxford English, Acronym dictionaries, and now this SF dictionary, its time for a good way to search them.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What would ANYONE do with a SF words database anyway? I'm confused...
Do you know what a "dictionary" (as in "Oxford English Dictionary") is? It's kind of like a database of words.
Guess what? There's a lot of words used in SF that aren't used much in other areas, or that have different meanings in SF. The OED wants to document the whole English language, and that necessarily includes the English used in SF literature.
And you know what as well? A lot of SF fans like reading SF literature. So the OED thinks, hey, maybe we can save ourselves some effort by putting up this database and asking all the geeks out there to tell us what's wrong, what's missing, and where a word was used earlier than we know about.
Makes a lot of sense when you know what it's all about, doesn't it?
The OED was put together by a large army of volunteers, who laboriously found and copied out examples of the use of words over the years, researched the etymology, and mailed the information to the editor. The editors (the project took 71 years (or less than 50, or more than 100, depending on how you choose to count), and several editors died of old age along the way) would assemble the scraps of information into a coherent entry for every word which was ever used in written English.
But, I think they're charging a lot for their dictionary, and I wouldn't donate any material to them.
Oxford and Clarendon Press only paid for a small staff, and the vast majority of the gruntwork was done by the army of English and American volunteer philologists. 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.
It seems to me that the OED is something of a profit center for them. I would be happy to make contributions to a project which was making my free contribution freely available to all. If Oxford wants me to contribute to their cash cow, they can send me some of the cash.
See what I've been reading.