The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles I-II. [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION This Dictionary is an abridgement officially authorized by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, later known as The Oxford English Dictionary. The need for such an abridged form of the great work was envisaged at the outset. The publication of this work is, in fact, a fulfilment of one of the provisions of the agreement entered into in the year 1879 between the Philological Society and the Oxford University Press. The relevant clause of the Indenture runs as follows: The Delegates may (if and whenever they think fit) prepare and publish any Dictionaries compiled or abridged from the principal Dictionary, and in such form as they may think fit, and may deal with the same in all respects at their discretion. It was not until 1902 that the project of an abridgement was initiated. It was clear that the editors and staff engaged on the principal work had their hands too full to undertake it. A scholar from outside was found for the task in the late Mr. William Little, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who was asked to submit specimens in 1902, and with him negotiations were officially entered into on 24 April 1903. The work was carried on steadily by him until his death in January 1922. By this time he had prepared entirely without assistance the manuscript for the letters A to T and V, and had passed for printing about one-third of the whole dictionary. Upon his death the materials left by him were placed in my hands for revision and completion. The gaps in the manuscript 'copy' were filled by Mr. H. W. Fowler, who abridged U and X, Y, Z, and by Mrs. E. A. Coulson, who was responsible for W. In the earlier stages of my editorship I was assisted by two experienced members of the Oxford Dictionary staff, Mr. F. J. Sweatman, M.A. Oxon., and Mr. J. W. Birt. Since 1924, when these assistants could no longer be spared for the work, the following ladies have successively taken part: Mrs. J. W. Alden (Miss A. M. Savage), M.A. Oxon., and three graduates in English of the University of Leeds, Mrs. E. A. Coulson (Miss J. Senior), Miss M. Dawn, and Miss S. M. Mills. The services rendered by all these helpers and their share in bringing the work to a successful conclusion are here gratefully acknowledged. The aim of this Dictionary is to present in miniature all the features of the principal work. It is designed to embrace not only the literary and colloquial English of the present day together with such technical and scientific terms as are most frequently met with or are likely to be the subject of inquiry, but also a considerable proportion of obsolete, archaic, and dialectal words and uses. The Oxford Dictionary was compiled and edited from materials amounting to over five million quotations, derived from English works of literature and records of all kinds, and resulted in 15,000 large quarto pages, in which nearly half a million words are recorded with more than one and a half million illustrative quotations. This INTRODUCTION The following sections contain an exposition of the contents and method of this Dictionary, with directions for its use. § i. The general order and arrangement of an article is as follows(all possible features, which are of necessity not present in all or even the majority of words, being taken into account), (i) The catchword in heavy type, preceded where necessary by a diacritic mark of the status of the word (f obsolete, || alien), is followed by (ii) the pronunciation in phonetic transcript (§ 3), where this is not sufficiently indicated by stress-marks in the catchword itself, or unless the word is obsolete (the pronunciation being then omitted), and (iii) the notation of the part of speech (except where the word is a substantive and there is no word of another part of speech spelt in the same way). Next comes (iv) the indication of the modern currency of the word, unless already noted by a symbol, e.g. whether it is now literary, colloquial, slang, or surviving only in archaic, historical, dialectal, or other limited use. Then follows, where appropriate, (v) a statement of variant spellings or inflexional forms in heavy type with their pronunciations, if these have some special importance. The next item, which is a feature of all articles, is the indication of (vi) the earliest appearance of the word, which is shown either by the symbols OE., ME., late ME. (§4), or by a precise date. This is succeeded by (vii) the etymology enclosed within square brackets (§ 5); (viii) the specification of the word as belonging to some art or science(Mwi., Bot., etc., for which see pp. xxiii-xxv) if it is entirely so restricted; (ix) the meanings, numbered or lettered, with specification of their status and with the date of their first appearance, or, if they are obsolete, an indication of their last known occurrence (§6). After each group of senses there is normally (x) a block of quotations with dates or indications of authorship, numbered according to the senses which they exemplify (§ 6). (xi) Groups of idiomatic phrases or attributive uses and combinations conclude the article, unless there are (xii) derivatives of minor importance, which are appended with an introductory 'Hence' or 'So' (§ 7). § 2. The vocabulary of this Dictionary is designed to include all words in regular literary and colloquial use, together with a selection of those which belong to the terminology of the arts and sciences and those which are current only in archaic or dialectal use, as well as of words now obsolete but of importance during some period of our literature. The individual words of the vocabulary may be classified in various ways. In this work a broad distinction is made between natives and denizens (naturalized foreigners) on the one hand, and aliens (non-naturalized foreigners) on the other. Natives are words of Old English origin, denizens are borrowings from foreign languages which have acquired full English citizenship, aliens are words that retain their foreign appearance and to some extent their foreign sound. This last group is distinguished by the prefixing of || to the catchword. Words are also classifiable according to the sphere of their currency and usage. Where they do not belong to the language common to literature and everyday speech the circumstances of their use call for some characterization. Hence the necessity for such labels as, on the one hand, obsolete (marked by f), literary, colloquial, slang, dialectal, local, archaic, vulgar, md on the other, Art, Natural History, Mathematics, and so on. The composition of a vocabulary under these aspects may be usefully pictured in such a diagram as that devised by Sir James Murray, which is here reproduced with some modifications from Vol. I, p. xxvii, of the Oxford English Dictionary: