Murray also included the rodent, the agouti the South American howling monkey, the alouatte and the Philippine textile, abaca. The first version of the OED, released in 1884, contained words from all round the world, from aard-vark and aard-wolf to acacia. One reviewer wrote: “There is no surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than in the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign words.”īut Murray pressed on, as, later, did Onions, helped by readers from around the world.Īs well as Americanisms and other regional variations in English, there were also those which entered English globally, such as typhoon, okra, abattoir, svelte and bamboo, or those restricted to a particular region, for example pak pai in Hong Kong, which is a car used illegally as a taxi. In tracing the discrepancy back to its origins, she found that the dictionary’s first editor, James Murray, in the 19th century, was harshly criticised for including contributions by correspondents from as far away as Ceylon, Mexico, and New Zealand.
If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it never leaves,” Ogilvie said. If a word gets into the OED, it never leaves. The OED is now re-evaluating words expunged by Burchfield, who died in 2004, aged 81. She found that, far from opening up the OED to foreign linguistic influences, Burchfield had deleted 17 percent of the “loanwords” and world English words that had been included by Onions, who included 45 percent more foreign words than Burchfield.Įxamples of Burchfield’s deleted words include balisaur, an Indian badger-like animal the American English wake-up, a golden-winged woodpecker boviander, the name in British Guyana for a person of mixed race living on the river banks and danchi, a Bengali shrub. She undertook a detailed analysis of Burchfield’s supplement, comparing it with the 1933 supplement by Charles Onions and William Craigie. They certainly weren’t these Anglocentric, judging kind of editors - they were very sensitive to cultural differences and they seemed to be putting in a lot of foreign words and a lot of words from different varieties of English, which must have been amazing for that day when colonial varieties of English were just emerging,” said Ogilvie. “I observed a pattern, that actually it was the earlier editors who were dealing with words in a really enlightened way. Ogilvie’s book, Words of the World, challenges the widely held belief that editors of the OED between 18 were Anglocentric Oxford dons obsessed with preserving the Queen’s English, and that it was not until Robert Burchfield’s four supplements, produced between 19, that the dictionary was opened up to the wider world. Robert Burchfield’s efforts to rewrite the dictionary have been uncovered by Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist, lexicographer and former editor on the OED. An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.
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