Fantasy is a genre of art that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. The genre is generally distinguished from science fiction and horror by overall look, feel, and theme of the individual work, though there is a great deal of overlap between the three (collectively known as speculative fiction). In its broadest sense, fantasy comprises works by many writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians, from ancient myths and legends to many recent works embraced by a wide audience today.
The genre of fantasy is generally distinguished from other works that may use things believed to be impossible by its internal consistency (the marvels do not alter their behavior without reason in a work) and its presentation as true in its context.
Traits of fantasy
The identifying traits of fantasy are the inclusion of fantastic elements in a self-coherent setting. Within such a structure, any location of the fantastical element is possible: it may be hidden in, or leak into the apparently real world setting, it may draw the characters into a world with such elements, or it may occur entirely in a fantasy world setting, where such elements are part of the world.
Within a given work, the elements must not only obey rules, but for plot reasons, must also contain limits to allow both the heroes and the villains means to fight; magical elements must come with prices, or the story would become unstructured.
History
Though the genre in its modern form is less than two centuries old, its antecedents have a long and distinguished history.
Beginning perhaps with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the earliest written documents known to humankind, mythic and other elements that would eventually come to define fantasy and its various subgenres have been a part of some of the grandest and most celebrated works of literature. From The Odyssey to Beowulf, from the Mahabharata to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, from the Ramayana to the Journey to the West, and from the Arthurian legend and medieval romance to the epic poetry of the Divine Comedy, fantastical adventures featuring brave heroes and heroines, deadly monsters, and secret arcane realms have inspired many audiences. In this sense, the history of fantasy and the history of literature are inextricably intertwined.
There are many works where the boundary between fantasy and other works is not clear; the question of whether the writers believed in the possibilities of the marvels in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes it difficult to distinguish when fantasy, in its modern sense, first began.
The history of modern fantasy literature begins with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes, the latter of which is widely considered to be the first fantasy novel ever written for adults. MacDonald was a major influence on both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The other major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, a popular English poet who wrote several novels in the latter part of the century, including The Well at the World’s End.
Despite MacDonald’s future influence and Morris’s contemporary popularity, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience. Edward Plunkett, better known as Lord Dunsany, established the genre’s popularity in both the novel and the short story form. Many popular mainstream authors also began to write fantasy at this time, including H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These authors, along with Abraham Merritt, established what was known as the “lost world” sub-genre, which was the most popular form of fantasy in the early decades of the 20th century, although several classic children’s fantasies, such as Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, were also published around this time.
Indeed, juvenile fantasy was considered more acceptable than fantasy intended for adults, with the effect that writers who wished to write fantasy had to fit their work in a work for children. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote many works verging on fantasy, but in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, intended for children, wrote fantasy. For many years, this created the circular effect that all fantasy works, even The Lord of the Rings, were therefore classified as children’s literature.
In 1923 the first all-fantasy fiction magazine, Weird Tales, was created. Many other similar magazines eventually followed, most noticeably The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The pulp magazine format was at the height of its popularity at this time and was instrumental in bringing fantasy fiction to a wide audience in both the U.S. and Britain. Such magazines were also instrumental in the rise of science fiction, and it was at this time the two genres began to be associated with each other.
By 1950 “sword and sorcery” fiction had begun to find a wide audience, with the success of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. However, it was the advent of high fantasy, and most of all the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s, that allowed fantasy to truly enter the mainstream. Several other series, such as C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, helped cement the genre’s popularity.
The popularity of the fantasy genre has continued to increase in the 21st century, as evidenced by the best-selling status of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Several fantasy film adaptations have achieved blockbuster status, most notably The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson.
Media
For more details on this topic, see fantasy art, fantasy literature, fantasy film, and fantasy television.
Fantasy is a popular genre, having found a home for itself in almost every medium. While fantasy art and recently fantasy films have been increasingly popular, it is been fantasy literature which has always been the genre’s primary medium.
Fantasy role-playing games cross several different media. The “pen & paper” role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was the first and is arguably the most successful and influential, though the pseudo-science fantasy role-playing game series Final Fantasy has been an icon of the computer role-playing game genre. Role-playing games have in turn spawned much new art, literature, and even music in the genre. Game companies have published fantasy novels set in their own fictional game universes; the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance series are two of the more popular.
Similarly, series of novels based on fantasy films and TV series have found their own niche.
Subgenres
Modern fantasy, including early modern fantasy, has also spawned many new subgenres with no clear counterpart in mythology or folklore, although inspiration from mythology and folklore remains a consistent theme. Fantasy subgenres are numerous and diverse, frequently overlapping with other forms of speculative fiction in almost every medium in which they are produced. Noteworthy in this regard are the science fantasy and dark fantasy subgenres, which the fantasy genre shares with science fiction and horror, respectively.
Subculture
Professionals such as publishers, editors, authors, artists, and scholars within the fantasy genre get together yearly at the World Fantasy Convention. The World Fantasy Awards are presented at the convention. The first WFC was held in 1975, and it has occurred every year since. The convention is held at a different city each year.
Additionally, many science fiction conventions, such as Florida’s FX Show or MegaCon, also cater to fantasy and horror fans; and anime conventions, such as JACON or Anime Expo frequently feature showings of fantasy, science fantasy, and dark fantasy series and films, such as Cardcaptor Sakura (fantasy), Sailor Moon (science fantasy), xxxHolic (dark fantasy), and Spirited Away (fantasy). Many science fiction/fantasy and anime conventions also strongly feature or cater to one or more of the several subcultures within the main subcultures, including the cosplay subculture (in which people make and/or wear costumes based on existing or self-created characters, sometimes also acting out skits or plays as well), the fan fiction subculture, and the fan vid or AMV subculture, as well as the large internet subculture devoted to reading and writing prose fiction and/or doujinshi in or related to those genres.
Fantasy Fiction
Genre of unrealistic fiction. The term has been loosely applied to a range of works and attempts to define it more precisely have not been successful. However, a feature shared by most fantasy fiction is its reliance on strangeness of setting (often an imaginary or dream world) and of characters (supernatural or non-human beings).
The genre was advanced by 19th-century works, such as The King of the Golden River (1851) by John Ruskin, The Rose and the Ring (1855) by William Makepeace Thackeray, The Water Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley, and Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, most of which were written for children but also appealed to adults. As a commercial literary genre, fantasy began to thrive after the success of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). Terry Pratchett, one of Britain’s leading fantasy writers, has produced many best-sellers including Mort (1987), and has achieved cult status.
Where do new words come from? How do you figure out their histories?
Etymology
An etymology is the history of a linguistic form, such as a word; the same term is also used for the study of word histories. A dictionary etymology tells us what is known of an English word before it became the word entered in that dictionary. If the word was created in English, the etymology shows, to whatever extent is not already obvious from the shape of the word, what materials were used to form it. If the word was borrowed into English, the etymology traces the borrowing process backward from the point at which the word entered English to the earliest records of the ancestral language. Where it is relevant, an etymology notes words from other languages that are related (“akin”) to the word in the dictionary entry, but that are not in the direct line of borrowing.
How new words are formed
An etymologist, a specialist in the study of etymology, must know a good deal about the history of English and also about the relationships of sound and meaning and their changes over time that underline the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family. Knowledge is also needed of the various processes by which words are created within Modern English; the most important processes are listed below.
Borrowing
A majority of the words used in English today are of foreign origin. English still derives much of its vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but we have also borrowed words from nearly all of the languages in Europe. In the modern period of linguistic acquisitiveness, English has found vocabulary opportunities even farther afield. From the period of the Renaissance voyages through the days when the sun never set upon the British Empire and up to the present, a steady stream of new words has flowed into the language to match the new objects and experiences English speakers have encountered all over the globe. Over 120 languages are on record as sources of present-day English vocabulary.
Shortening or clipping
Clipping (or truncation) is a process whereby an appreciable chunk of an existing word is omitted, leaving what is sometimes called a stump word. When it is the end of a word that is lopped off, the process is called back-clipping: thus examination was docked to create exam and gymnasium was shortened to form gym. Less common in English are fore-clippings, in which the beginning of a word is dropped: thus phone from telephone. Very occasionally, we see a sort of fore-and-aft clipping, such as flu, from influenza.
Functional shift
A functional shift is the process by which an existing word or form comes to be used with another grammatical function (often a different part of speech); an example of a functional shift would be the development of the noun commute from the verb commute.
Back-formation
Back-formation occurs when a real or supposed affix (that is, a prefix or suffix) is removed from a word to create a new one. For example, the original name for a type of fruit was cherise, but some thought that word sounded plural, so they began to use what they believed to be a singular form, cherry, and a new word was born. The creation of the the verb enthuse from the noun enthusiasm is also an example of a back-formation.
Blends
A blend is a word made by combining other words or parts of words in such a way that they overlap (as motel from motor plus hotel) or one is infixed into the other (as chortle from snort plus chuckle — the -ort- of the first being surrounded by the ch-. . .-le of the second). The term blend is also sometimes used to describe words like brunch, from breakfast plus lunch, in which pieces of the word are joined but there is no actual overlap. The essential feature of a blend in either case is that there be no point at which you can break the word with everything to the left of the breaking being a morpheme (a separately meaningful, conventionally combinable element) and everything to the right being a morpheme, and with the meaning of the blend-word being a function of the meaning of these morphemes. Thus, birdcage and psychohistory are not blends, but are instead compounds.
Acronymic formations
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a phrase. Some acronymic terms still clearly show their alphabetic origins (consider FBI), but others are pronounced like words instead of as a succession of letter names: thus NASA and NATO are pronounced as two syllable words. If the form is written lowercase, there is no longer any formal clue that the word began life as an acronym: thus radar (‘radio detecting and ranging’). Sometimes a form wavers between the two treatments: CAT scan pronounced either like cat or C-A-T.
NOTE: No origin is more pleasing to the general reader than an acronymic one. Although acronymic etymologies are perennially popular, many of them are based more in creative fancy than in fact. For an example of such an alleged acronymic etymology, see the article on posh.
Transfer of personal or place names
Over time, names of people, places, or things may become generalized vocabulary words. Thus did forsythia develop from the name of botanist William Forsyth, silhouette from the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a parsimonious French controller general of finances, and denim from serge de Nîmes (a fabric made in Nîmes, France).
Imitation of sounds
Words can also be created by onomatopoeia, the naming of things by a more or less exact reproduction of the sound associated with it. Words such as buzz, hiss, guffaw, whiz, and pop) are of imitative origin.
Folk etymology
Folk etymology, also known as popular etymology, is the process whereby a word is altered so as to resemble at least partially a more familiar word or words. Sometimes the process seems intended to “make sense of” a borrowed foreign word using native resources: for example, the Late Latin febrigugia (a plant with medicinal properties, etymologically ‘fever expeller’) was modified into English as feverfew.
Combining word elements
Also available to one who feels the need for a new word to name a new thing or express a new idea is the very considerable store of prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms that already exist in English. Some of these are native and others are borrowed from French, but the largest number have been taken directly from Latin or Greek, and they have been combined in may different ways often without any special regard for matching two elements from the same original language. The combination of these word elements has produced many scientific and technical terms of Modern English.
Literary and creative coinages
Once in a while, a word is created spontaneously out of the creative play of sheer imagination. Words such as boondoggle and googol are examples of such creative coinages, but most such inventive brand-new words do not gain sufficiently widespread use to gain dictionary entry unless their coiner is well known enough so his or her writings are read, quoted, and imitated. British author Lewis Carroll was renowned for coinages such as jabberwocky, galumph, and runcible, but most such new words are destined to pass in and out of existence with very little notice from most users of English.
An etymologist tracing the history of a dictionary entry must review the etymologies at existing main entries and prepare such etymologies as are required for the main entries being added to the new edition. In the course of the former activity, adjustments must sometimes be made either to incorporate a useful piece of information that has been previously overlooked or to review the account of the word’s origin in light of new evidence. Such evidence may be unearthed by the etymologist or may be the product of published research by other scholars. In writing new etymologies, the etymologist must, of course, be alive to the possible languages from which a new term may have been created or borrowed, and must be prepared to research and analyze a wide range of documented evidence and published sources in tracing a word’s history. The etymologist must sift theories, often-conflicting theories of greater or lesser likelihood, and try to evaluate the evidence conservatively but fairly to arrive at the soundest possible etymology that the available information permits.
When all attempts to provide a satisfactory etymology have failed, an etymologist may have to declare that a word’s origin is unknown. The label “origin unknown” in an etymology seldom means that the etymologist is unaware of various speculations about the origin of a term, but instead usually means that no single theory conceived by the etymologist or proposed by others is well enough backed by evidence to include in a serious work of reference, even when qualified by “probably” or “perhaps.”
Traits of fantasy
The identifying traits of fantasy are the inclusion of fantastic elements in a self-coherent setting.[2] Within such a structure, any location of the fantastical element is possible: it may be hidden in, or leak into the apparently real world setting, it may draw the characters into a world with such elements, or it may occur entirely in a fantasy world setting, where such elements are part of the world.[3]
Within a given work, the elements must not only obey rules, but for plot reasons, must also contain limits to allow both the heroes and the villains means to fight; magical elements must come with prices, or the story would become unstructured.[4]
History
For more details on this topic, see History of fantasy.
Though the genre in its modern form is less than two centuries old, its antecedents have a long and distinguished history.
Fairy tales and legends, such as Dobrynya Nikitich’s rescue of Zabava Putyatichna from the dragon Gorynych, have been an important source for fantasy
Beginning perhaps with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the earliest written documents known to humankind, mythic and other elements that would eventually come to define fantasy and its various subgenres have been a part of some of the grandest and most celebrated works of literature. From The Odyssey to Beowulf, from the Mahabharata to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, from the Ramayana to the Journey to the West, and from the Arthurian legend and medieval romance to the epic poetry of the Divine Comedy, fantastical adventures featuring brave heroes and heroines, deadly monsters, and secret arcane realms have inspired many audiences. In this sense, the history of fantasy and the history of literature are inextricably intertwined.
Many works are unclear as to the belief of the authors in the marvels they contain, as in the enchanted garden from the Decameron
There are many works where the boundary between fantasy and other works is not clear; the question of whether the writers believed in the possibilities of the marvels in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes it difficult to distinguish when fantasy, in its modern sense, first began.[5]
The history of modern fantasy literature begins with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes, the latter of which is widely considered to be the first fantasy novel ever written for adults. MacDonald was a major influence on both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The other major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, a popular English poet who wrote several novels in the latter part of the century, including The Well at the World’s End.
Despite MacDonald’s future influence and Morris’s contemporary popularity, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience. Edward Plunkett, better known as Lord Dunsany, established the genre’s popularity in both the novel and the short story form. Many popular mainstream authors also began to write fantasy at this time, including H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These authors, along with Abraham Merritt, established what was known as the “lost world” sub-genre, which was the most popular form of fantasy in the early decades of the 20th century, although several classic children’s fantasies, such as Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, were also published around this time.
Indeed, juvenile fantasy was considered more acceptable than fantasy intended for adults, with the effect that writers who wished to write fantasy had to fit their work in a work for children.[6] Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote many works verging on fantasy, but in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, intended for children, wrote fantasy.[7] For many years, this created the circular effect that all fantasy works, even The Lord of the Rings, were therefore classified as children’s literature.
In 1923 the first all-fantasy fiction magazine, Weird Tales, was created. Many other similar magazines eventually followed, most noticeably The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The pulp magazine format was at the height of its popularity at this time and was instrumental in bringing fantasy fiction to a wide audience in both the U.S. and Britain. Such magazines were also instrumental in the rise of science fiction, and it was at this time the two genres began to be associated with each other.
By 1950 “sword and sorcery” fiction had begun to find a wide audience, with the success of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. However, it was the advent of high fantasy, and most of all the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s, that allowed fantasy to truly enter the mainstream. Several other series, such as C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, helped cement the genre’s popularity.
The popularity of the fantasy genre has continued to increase in the 21st century, as evidenced by the best-selling status of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Several fantasy film adaptations have achieved blockbuster status, most notably The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson.
[edit] Media
For more details on this topic, see fantasy art, fantasy literature, fantasy film, and fantasy television.
Fantasy is a popular genre, having found a home for itself in almost every medium. While fantasy art and recently fantasy films have been increasingly popular, it is been fantasy literature which has always been the genre’s primary medium.
Fantasy role-playing games cross several different media. The “pen & paper” role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was the first and is arguably the most successful and influential, though the pseudo-science fantasy role-playing game series Final Fantasy has been an icon of the computer role-playing game genre. Role-playing games have in turn spawned much new art, literature, and even music in the genre. Game companies have published fantasy novels set in their own fictional game universes; the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance series are two of the more popular.
Similarly, series of novels based on fantasy films and TV series have found their own niche.
[edit] Subgenres
For more details on this topic, see Fantasy subgenres.
Modern fantasy, including early modern fantasy, has also spawned many new subgenres with no clear counterpart in mythology or folklore, although inspiration from mythology and folklore remains a consistent theme. Fantasy subgenres are numerous and diverse, frequently overlapping with other forms of speculative fiction in almost every medium in which they are produced. Noteworthy in this regard are the science fantasy and dark fantasy subgenres, which the fantasy genre shares with science fiction and horror, respectively.
[edit] Subculture
Professionals such as publishers, editors, authors, artists, and scholars within the fantasy genre get together yearly at the World Fantasy Convention. The World Fantasy Awards are presented at the convention. The first WFC was held in 1975, and it has occurred every year since. The convention is held at a different city each year.
Additionally, many science fiction conventions, such as Florida’s FX Show or MegaCon, also cater to fantasy and horror fans; and anime conventions, such as JACON or Anime Expo frequently feature showings of fantasy, science fantasy, and dark fantasy series and films, such as Cardcaptor Sakura (fantasy), Sailor Moon (science fantasy), xxxHolic (dark fantasy), and Spirited Away (fantasy). Many science fiction/fantasy and anime conventions also strongly feature or cater to one or more of the several subcultures within the main subcultures, including the cosplay subculture (in which people make and/or wear costumes based on existing or self-created characters, sometimes also acting out skits or plays as well), the fan fiction subculture, and the fan vid or AMV subculture, as well as the large internet subculture devoted to reading and writing prose fiction and/or doujinshi in or related to those genres.
[edit] The first editors
Trench played a key role in the first months of the project, but his ecclesiastical career meant that he could not give the dictionary the continued attention that it needed over a period that, it was realized, might easily be as long as ten years. So he withdrew, and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor.
On May 12, 1860, Coleridge’s plan for the work was published, and the research was set in motion. His home became the first editorial office; he ordered a grid of 54 pigeon-holes in which 100,000 quotation slips could be arrayed. In April 1861, the first sample pages were published. Later that month, Coleridge, aged just 31, died of tuberculosis.
The editorship then fell to Furnivall, who had great enthusiasm and knowledge, but lacked the temperament for such a long-term project. His energetic start saw many assistants recruited and two tons of readers’ slips and other materials delivered to his house, and in many cases passed on to these assistants. Furnivall realized that an efficient system of excerpting was needed. He therefore founded in 1864 the Early English Text Society and in 1865 the Chaucer Society, preparing editions of texts of general benefit as well as immediate value to the project. None of this work, however, led to compilation; it was entirely preparatory and lasted for 21 years.
In the 1870s Furnivall unsuccessfully approached Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him, before James Murray agreed to accept the post.
There were in the end some 800 voluntary readers. Their enthusiasm was enormous, but in a process which depended on paper and pen alone, a major drawback was that the choices made by the relatively untrained volunteers regarding what to read and select, what to discard, and how much detail to provide were often arbitrary. One prolific contributor, W. C. Minor, was later discovered by Murray to be an inmate of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. As months and years passed, the project languished. Furnivall began to lose track of his assistants, some of whom assumed that the project was abandoned; others died and their slips were not returned. The entire set of quotation slips for words starting with H was later found in Tuscany; others were assumed to be waste paper and burned as tinder.
[edit] The Oxford editors
At the same time the Society had become concerned about the publication of what it was now clear would have to be an immensely large book. Various publishers had been approached over the years, either to produce sample pages or for the possible publication of the whole, but no agreements had been reached. Those approached included both the Cambridge University Press and the OUP.
Finally, in 1879, after two years of negotiations involving Sweet and Furnivall as well as Murray, the OUP agreed not only to publish the dictionary but also to pay Murray (who by this time was also president of the Philological Society) a salary as editor. They planned on publishing the work at intervals in fascicles, its final form consisting of four volumes of some 6,400 pages. They hoped to finish it in about ten years.
It was Murray who really got the project off the ground and was able to tackle its true scale. Because he had many children, he chose not to use his house in the London suburb of Mill Hill as a workplace; a corrugated iron outbuilding, which he called the “Scriptorium”, lined with wooden planks, was erected for him and his assistants. It was provided with 1,029 pigeon-holes for filing the slips of paper, and many bookshelves.
Murray now tracked down and regathered the slips collected by Furnivall, but he found them inadequate because readers had focused on rare and interesting words: he had ten times more quotations for abusion than for abuse. He therefore issued a new appeal for readers, which was widely published in newspapers and distributed in bookshops and libraries. This time readers were specifically asked to report “as many quotations as you can for ordinary words” as well as all of those that seemed “rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way.” Murray arranged for the Pennsylvanian philologist, Francis March, to manage the process in North America. Soon 1,000 slips per day were arriving at the Scriptorium, and by 1882 there were 3,500,000 of them.
It was February 1, 1884, 23 years after Coleridge’s sample pages, when the first portion, or fascicle, of the Dictionary was published. The full title had now become A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society, and the 352-page volume, covering words from A to Ant, was priced at 12s.6d. The total sales were a disappointing 4,000 copies.
It was now clear to the OUP that it would take much too long to complete the work if the editorial arrangements were not revised. Accordingly they supplied additional funding for assistants, but made two new demands on Murray in return. The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford, which he did in 1885. Again he had a Scriptorium built on his property (to appease a neighbour, this one had to be half-buried in the ground), and the Post Office installed a pillar box directly in front of his house.
The house at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, erstwhile residence of James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Note the pillar box in front of the house.
Murray was more resistant to the second requirement: that if he could not meet the desired schedule, then he must hire a second senior editor who would work in parallel, outside his supervision, on words from different parts of the alphabet. He did not want to share the work, and felt that it would eventually go faster as he gained experience. But it did not, and eventually Philip Gell of the OUP forced his hand. Henry Bradley, whom Murray had hired as his assistant in 1884, was promoted and began working independently in 1888, in a room at the British Museum in London. In 1896 Bradley moved to Oxford, working at the university itself.
Gell continued to harass both editors with the commercial goal of containing costs and speeding production, to the point where the project seemed likely to collapse; but once this was reported in the press, public opinion backed the editors. Gell was then dismissed, and the university reversed his policies on containing costs. If the editors felt that the Dictionary would have to grow larger than had been anticipated, then it would; it was an important enough work that the time and money necessary to finish it properly should be spent.
But neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it done. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A-D, H-K, O-P and T, or nearly half of the finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having done E-G, L-M, S-Sh, St and W-We. By this time two additional editors had also been promoted from assistant positions to work independently, so the work continued without too much trouble. William Craigie, starting in 1901, was responsible for N, Q-R, Si-Sq, U-V and Wo-Wy; whereas the OUP had previously felt that London was too far from Oxford for the editors to work there, after 1925 Craigie’s work on the dictionary was done in Chicago, where he had accepted a professorship. The fourth editor was C. T. Onions, who, starting in 1914, covered the remaining ranges, Su-Sz, Wh-Wo and X-Z.
[edit] The fascicles
By early 1894 a total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A-B, five for C, and two for E. Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which would eventually become a volume break). At this point it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent installments: once every three months, beginning in 1895, there would now be a fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s.6d. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles.
Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was first used. It then appeared only on the outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else.
The 125th and last fascicle, covering words from Wise to the end of W, was published on April 19, 1928, and the full Dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately.
[edit] The First Edition and the first Supplement
It had been planned to publish the New English Dictionary in ten volumes, starting with A, C, D, F, H, L, O, Q, Si, and Ti; but as the project proceeded, the later volumes became larger and larger, and, while the full 1928 edition officially retained the intended numbering, Volumes IX and X were published as two “half-volumes” each, split at Su and V respectively. The entire edition was also available as a set of 20 half-volumes, with two choices of binding. The price was 50 or 55 guineas (£52.10s or £57.15s) depending on the format and binding. The dictionary covered 414,825 words backed by five million quotations, of which some two million were actually printed in the dictionary text.
It had been 44 years since the publication of A-Ant and, of course, the English language had continued to develop and change. So by this time the early volumes were noticeably out of date. The solution was for the same teams to produce a Supplement, listing all words and senses that had developed since the relevant pages were first printed; this also gave the opportunity to correct any errors or omissions. Purchasers of the 1928 edition were promised a free copy of the supplement when it appeared.
The supplement was again produced by two editors working in parallel. Craigie, now being in the United States, did most of the research on American English usages; he also edited L-R and U-Z, while Onions did A-K and S-T. The work took another five years.
In 1933 the entire dictionary was reissued, now officially under the title of Oxford English Dictionary for the first time. The volumes after the first six were adjusted to equalize them somewhat and eliminate the “half-volume” numbering: the main dictionary now consisted of 12 volumes, numbered as such, and starting at A, C, D, F, H, L, N, Poyesye, S, Sole, T, and V. The supplement was included as the 13th volume. The price of the dictionary was reduced to 20 guineas (£21).
[edit] The second Supplement and the Second Edition
In 1933 Oxford University had finally put the Dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. But of course the English language continued to change, and by the time 20 years had passed, the Dictionary was outdated.
There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement, of perhaps one or two volumes; but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for the user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset, with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but of course this would be most expensive, with perhaps 15 volumes to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement.
Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit it; Onions, who turned 84 that year, was still able to make some contributions as well. Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language, and through the supplement the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield also broadened the scope to include developments of the language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom, including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. The work was expected to take seven to ten years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four volumes, starting with A, H, O and Sea. They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement.
But by this time it was clear that the full text of the Dictionary now needed to be computerized. Achieving this would still require retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching — as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this began in 1983 and editorial work started the following year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, and with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors.
Editing an entry of the NOED using LEXX
And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project began. More than 120 keyboarders of International Computaprint Corporation in Tampa, Florida, and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, USA, started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. But, retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML; and a specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under a 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, led by F.W. Tompa and Gaston Gonnet; this search technology went on to be the basis for Open Text Corporation. Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM; the colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX, was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz, an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, told Paul Gray for TIME (March 27, 1989), “I’ve never been associated with a project, I’ve never even heard of a project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline.”
By 1989 the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield’s supplement, and a small amount of newer material into a single unified dictionary. The word “new” was again dropped from the name, and the Second Edition of the OED, or the OED2, was published. (The first edition retronymically became the OED1.)
The OED2 was printed in 20 volumes. For the first time there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with A, B.B.C., Cham, Creel, Dvandva, Follow, Hat, Interval, Look, Moul, Ow, Poise, Quemadero, Rob, Ser, Soot, Su, Thru, Unemancipated, and Wave.
Although the content of the OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. And whereas Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard one at the time, the OED2 adopted today’s International Phonetic Alphabet. Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated.
When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. The author Anthony Burgess declared it “the greatest publishing event of the century,” as quoted by Dan Fisher for the Los Angeles Times (March 25, 1989). TIME dubbed the book “a scholarly Everest,” and Richard Boston, writing for the London Guardian (March 24, 1989), called it “one of the wonders of the world.”
New material was published in the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, two small volumes in 1993, and a third in 1997, bringing the dictionary to a total of 23 volumes. Each of the supplements added about 3,000 new definitions. However, no more Additions volumes are planned, and it is not expected that any part of the Third Edition, or OED3, will be printed in fascicles.
[edit] The Compact Editions
Meanwhile, in 1971, the full content of the 13-volume OED1 from 1933 was reprinted as a Compact Edition of just two volumes. This was achieved by photographically reducing each page to ½ its original linear dimensions, so that four original pages were shown on each page (“4-up” format). The two volumes started at A and P, with the Supplement included at the end of the second volume.
The Compact Edition was sold in a case that also included, in a small drawer, a magnifying glass to help users read the reduced type. Many copies were sold through book clubs, which distributed them cheaply to their members.
In 1987 the second Supplement was published as a third volume in the same Compact Edition format. For the OED2, in 1991, the Compact Edition format was changed to ⅓ of the original linear dimensions (9-up), requiring stronger magnification but also allowing the entire dictionary to be published in a single volume for the first time. Even after these volumes had been published, though, book club offers commonly continued to feature the two-volume 1971 Compact Edition. It is common to read comments praising this earlier edition for its better readability (larger text) and convenience (two smaller volumes), besides the quality of the case and the existence of the magnifying glass drawer in it.
[edit] The electronic versions
Screenshot of the first CD-ROM edition of the OED
Now that the text of the dictionary was digitized and online, it could also be published on CD-ROM. The text of the First Edition was made available in 1988. Afterward, three versions of the second edition were issued. Version 1 (1992) was identical in content to the printed Second Edition, and the CD itself was not copy-protected. Version 2 (1999) had some additions to the corpus, and updated software with improved searching features, but had clumsy copy-protection that made it difficult to use and would even cause the program to deny use to OUP staff in the middle of demonstrations of the product. Version 3 (2002) has additional words and software improvements, though its copy-protection is still as unforgiving as that of the earlier version, and it is available for Microsoft Windows only.
Single-click access to Oxford dictionaries is also available with Babylon Translator, which provides access to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus with 240,000 definitions and 365,000 synonyms and antonyms.[1]
Screenshot of OED Online
On March 14, 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) became available to subscribers.[2] The online database contains the entire OED2 and is updated quarterly with revisions that will be included in the OED3 (see below). The online edition is the most up-to-date one available.
As the price for an individual to use this edition, even after a reduction in 2004, is £195 or $295 US every year, most subscribers are large organizations such as universities. Some of them do not use the Oxford English Dictionary Online portal and have legally downloaded the entire database into their organization’s computers. Some public libraries and companies have subscribed as well, including, in March and April 2006, most public libraries in England and Wales[3] and New Zealand;[4][5] any person belonging to a library subscribing to the service is able to use the service from their own home.
A slightly more appealing method of payment was also introduced in 2004, offering residents of North or South America the opportunity to pay $29.95 US a month to access the online site.
[edit] The Third Edition
The planned Third Edition, or OED3, is intended as a nearly complete overhaul of the work. Each word is being examined and revised to improve the accuracy of the definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and historical quotations—a task requiring the efforts of a staff consisting of more than 300 scholars, researchers, readers, and consultants, and projected to cost about $55 million. The end result is expected to double the overall length of the text. The style of the dictionary will also be changing slightly. The original text was more literary, in that most of the quotations were taken from novels, plays, and other literary sources. The new edition, however, will make reference to all manner of printed resources, such as cookbooks, wills, technical manuals, specialist journals, and rock lyrics. The pace of inclusion of new words has been increased as well, to the rate of about 4,000 per year.
New content can be viewed through the OED Online or on the periodically updated CD-ROM edition. It is possible that the OED3 will never be printed conventionally, but will be available only electronically. That will be a decision for the future, when it is nearer completion.
As of 2005, John Simpson is the Chief Editor. Since the first work by each editor tends to require more revision than his later, more polished work, it was decided to balance out this effect by performing the early, and perhaps itself less polished, work of this revision pass at a letter other than A. Accordingly, the main work of the OED3 has been proceeding in sequence from the letter M. When the OED Online was launched in March 2000, it included the first batch of revised entries (officially described as draft entries), stretching from M to mahurat, and successive sections of text have since been released on a quarterly basis; by March 2007, the revised section had reached prim. As new work is done on words in other parts of the alphabet, this is also included in each quarterly release.
The production of the new edition takes full advantage of computers, particularly since the June 2005 inauguration of the whimsically named “Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application”, or “Pasadena.” With this XML-based system, the attention of lexicographers can be directed more to matters of content than to presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. The new system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and enabled staff in New York to work directly on the Dictionary in the same way as their Oxford-based counterparts.[6]
Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage, and e-mail submissions of quotations by readers and the general public.
Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the general public for help in providing citations for 50 selected recent words, and produced antedatings for many. The results were reported in a BBC TV series, Balderdash and Piffle. Thus, the OED’s small army of devoted readers continue to contribute quotations; the department currently receives about 200,000 a year.
[edit] Spelling
Main article: Oxford spelling
The OED lists British spellings for headwords first (for example, labour and centre), followed by other variants (labor, center, etc.). OUP policy also dictates that -ize suffixes be favoured (instead of -ise) for many words more commonly ending in -ise in British English, even if the root is Latin rather than Greek. Examples are realize vs realise and globalization vs globalisation. Their rationale for this policy is partly on the linguistic basis that the suffix derives mainly from the Greek suffix -izo. They state however that -ze is also an Americanism in the fact that the -ze suffix has crept into words where it did not originally belong, as with analyse (British English), which is spelt analyze in American English [3]. Read more about -ize vs -ise.
The sentence “The group analysed labour statistics published by the organization” is an example of OUP practice. This spelling (which can be indicated by the registered IANA language tag en-GB-oed) is used by the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Organization for Standardization and other organizations, as well as many British-based academic publications, such as Nature, the Biochemical Journal and The Times Literary Supplement.
[edit] Miscellanea
J. R. R. Tolkien was once an employee of the OED (researching etymologies in the range from Waggle to Warlock), and gently parodied the four principal editors as “The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford” in his story Farmer Giles of Ham.
Julian Barnes was also an employee, but he did not like the work.
The early modern English prose of Sir Thomas Browne is the most frequently quoted source of neologisms.
William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer, with Hamlet his most-quoted work.
George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) is the most-quoted female.
Various translations of the Bible are collectively the most-quoted work, while the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi.
One of the most prolific early contributors as a reader, Dr. W. C. Minor, was at the time imprisoned in a criminal lunatic asylum. He invented his own system of tracking quotations so he could send in his slips only when the editors requested, or were ready to use them.
Tim Bray, co-creator of the Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the OED as the inspiration behind the development of the next-generation web language.
The word with the longest entry is the verb set. The OED describes over 430 senses of this word, and defines them in an entry of approximately 60,000 words.
It would take one person 120 years to type the 59 million words in the OED second edition and 60 years for it to be proofread, and 540 MB to store it electronically. [4]
The British quiz show Countdown has awarded the leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series since its inception in 1982.
The taboo words fuck and cunt did not appear in any widely-consulted dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1965. Their first appearance in the OED was in 1972.
While huge, the OED is not the world’s largest dictionary; that distinction goes to the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, which had similar goals, but took about twice as long to complete.
In 2007 the word wiki was added in reference to the use on the Internet rather than the original Hawai’ian meaning.
