Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

2.3 Adapting an information source to your needs: the OED
Unit 2 Using information sources
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

In this section we look at some of the uses of the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest dictionary of English vocabulary, first published by Oxford University Press in 1888 as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. The full version of the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, now exists as a second edition in a number of forms: as a collection of twenty volumes published in 1989, as a single volume with tiny print (and a magnifying glass), or as a CD- ROM. The dictionary is also available online.

The OED is a list of English words that, in certain respects, is very complete; it is most complete for Southern British English, but for other dialects there are similar dictionaries. For each word, a number of meanings (all those the word has had in its history) are distinguished, and quotations are given showing the word in use, including the earliest known use. Dictionaries are usually used as guides to the current usage (meaning, spelling or pronunciation) of difficult words, but the OED can be adapted to many other uses. We can illustrate this by looking at the first stanza of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ’To a Skylark’ (1820):

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

If you look up ’blithe’ in the OED you will find two appropriate meanings:

Meaning 2: exhibiting gladness . . . In ballads frequently coupled with ’gay’. Rare in modern English prose or speech; the last quotation with this meaning is 1807.

Meaning 3: Of men, their heart, spirit etc.: joyous . . . Rare in English prose or colloquial use since 16th century but frequent in poetry.

This dictionary entry acts as more than just a definition of the word; it tells us a number of interesting things relating to the poem. First, the word is used primarily in poetry - though in Shelley’s poem it might have seemed a little old-fashioned (since 1807 is the date of the last citation for meaning 2). Second, the word is typically used in ballads; a significant fact when we consider that Romantic poets like Shelley were influenced by folk poetry of this kind. Third, it is explicitly associated with the word ’spirit’ in the entry under meaning 3; the only quotation given that supports this association is in fact one from 1871, but nevertheless there may have been a traditional co-occurrence of these two words that Shelley drew upon. (It is also worth remembering that the OED, like any information source, provides only fragments and clues: there might be earlier or later uses of words that are not recorded in the dictionary.)

We could do the same with most of the words in this stanza; we might, for example, wonder how ’hail’ was generally used (what does it tell us about the spirit?), what meanings ’spirit’ had, how necessarily religious the word ’heaven’ was at this time, what the significance of combining ’unpremeditated’ with ’art’ was, and so on. It often happens that we may have one reason for looking a word up, but will find something unexpected in the process (e.g. with ’blithe’ I expected the term to have been old-fashioned, but I did not expect the link with ballads or with ’spirit’).

The OED, like other dictionaries, can also be used as a ’brainstorming’ aid when starting out on a research project. For example, if you were interested in the notion of ’spirit’ in Romantic poetry, it would be a good and easy start to look up ’spirit’ in the OED to see who used the word, what its history up to that time had been, how religious or otherwise its meanings were, and so on. By doing this you are adapting the OED to a new goal: you are using it as an admittedly partial guide to culture, as embodied in language use.

Other information sources can also be adapted in a similar way. A concordance, for example, can be used as a specialized dictionary of quotations (all from the same author), or an indication of the words that an author tends to combine together (a Shelley concordance would tell us instantly whether Shelley uses ’blithe spirit’ elsewhere), or an indication of the meaning that a particular word has for an author. Often you need to interpret the facts that the information source presents to you, and use them as a guide to further research.