Characteristics of Oxford English Dictionary
and Cobuild Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principle historical dictionary of the English language published by Oxford University Press. The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes. The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and by April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. The dictionary has a total vocabulary of 414,825 and citations of 1,827,306, and the total number of pages in 12 distribution volumes, which began to be called the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The pride of this dictionary is not in terms of vocabulary. There are often dictionaries that accommodate about 400,000 vocabulary words. It is the number of quotes that tell us the true value of this dictionary. The purpose of this dictionary is to clarify the use of words thoroughly. Unlike the early dictionaries of the Webster family, which will be introduced later, it is a dictionary to explain the use of thorough words and phrases. The absence of an illustration anywhere in the dictionary, or the absence of an adjective derived from a proper noun or its proper noun, is evidence of the OED editors' determination to thoroughly identify the use.
As you can see from the above explanation, this dictionary is not a dictionary that ordinary readers look up in a hurry for general reading. It is a useless dictionary for those who want to study English in moderation. This dictionary is necessary to know all about a word. At the same time, this dictionary is a dictionary that must be read with ease and enjoy from beginning to end. However, it takes considerable patience to do so. If you look for an item called “Take”, its meaning is divided into 13 major items, which are again divided into 91 sub-items, and these sub-items are subdivided into them. These contents continue to be more than 13 pages (16 pages in the revised version) in small letters. However, after reading everything, including the etymology, this dictionary surely rewards such hard work. OED is the last teacher we visit if no dictionary solves it.
The supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary consists of 330 pages. The first volume containing words starting with A was published in 1884, so, of course, the word aeroplane, which was not there at the time, is not included in the OED. The supplement contains new words that appeared over the course of 50 years. Along with these new words, the Supplement contains a vast amount of 92 pages of the source literature of quotes used in the dictionary.
In 1989, a revised version of the OED was released. It was edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. In addition to the original 13 volumes being increased to 20 volumes in the revised version, the number of vocabularies included increased to 464,000 and the number of quotes increased to 2,400,000. Needless to say, it includes not only the words that were originally in Supplement, but also the newly emerging vocabulary. The editorial policy follows that of the first edition. One surprising thing is that it contains all 20 books in one book. The original nine pages were reduced to one side. The size of the book has grown a little, but if you look a little further away, it seems that there are nine black squares on each page. Of course, you can't see it with the naked eye. These dictionaries in the box usually contain a magnifying glass one by one. What's even more surprising is that it contains 20 books on a single CD. 350 million words were put into a palm-sized CD. Due to the nature of electronic dictionaries, when using this CD version, horizontal searches are made instantaneously. For example, if you command the search for words ending in ‘ist’, such as typist, rapist, dentist, mechanist, etc., these words are collected on the screen. Knowing that there are about 10 Korean etymologies, including kimchi, is also the result of possible searches on the CD version. It is recorded that kimchi was first used in 1898.
Collins' Cobuild dictionary is a dictionary that is different from any other dictionary. In particular, it is a dictionary that embodies the concept of so-called 'vocabulary in context'. Those who looked up this dictionary will soon find out, but instead of presenting a solution to a given word, as in ordinary dictionaries, it let learners understand the meaning of the word themselves by presenting a context in which they will naturally know the meaning of the word. If someone starts reading this dictionary for the first time, he would probably study English from scratch with this dictionary, if possible. Let me give you a concrete example. If you look up the word "flatter" in the English-Korean dictionary, it usually says "아첨하다”, “우쭐대다”, “돋보이게 하다”, and “치살리다". This is consistent with the following solutions published in a recent edition of the POD. However, if you find the word "flattered" in the Cobuild dictionary, you will find an example of the meaning divided into multiple explanations.
According to the Cobuild Dictionary, “If you are flattered that someone has done something, you are pleased and made to feel rather important by the way that they have behaved towards you, especially when this is unexpected. For example, I was flattered that he remembered my name... I'm more flattered to be invited to your home.” In contrast, if we search the same word in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find multiple meanings; “flatter somebody to say nice things about somebody, often in a way that is not sincere. flatter somebody/something to make somebody look attractive; to make somebody seem more attractive or better than they really are”. Hence, we can say that Cobuild English Dictionary put someone or an object into place and make it feel as if something is happening now whereas Oxford Dictionary explains the actual meaning of a word.
To conclude, the Collins Dictionary has been produced in Glasgow since 1819, but there is no indication that it was intended to include all words in English, limited to only one book. However, the OED was established and is generally considered a comprehensive dictionary. Although a complete first edition, which filled 12 large books during the mid-20th century, was finally published in 1928, when it began in 1879. The second edition in 1989 absorbed a number of appendices that provided all the necessary updates and came out in 20 volumes. The current edition of the OED contains about 600,000 words. The Collins Dictionary has about 200,000 words, both of which are sufficiently comprehensive for most users.
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