Talk:Oxford English Dictionary
Quote "The OED is generally regarded as the definitive dictionary of Modern English, especially British English."
It is thus strange that some computer spell checkers treat an -ize ending to a word when spell checking for "British English" as an error!
The new language tag en-GB-oed was introduced so that, hopefully, spell checkers which spell check according to OED spelling will become available and so that people who write with OED style and use -ize endings where correct will no longer be told that they are "using an Americanism".
Songwriter 00:22 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I have two objections to the changes made to the Miscellanea section. First, why was Shakespeare removed as the most-quoted author, which is verified by the O.E.D. web site? Second, why was the most frequently quoted work changed from the Bible to Cursor Mundi? When I searched for Cursor Mundi, I only found 524 quotations in the New Edition and 16 in the Second Edition. But I might have been searching incorrectly—the source below found more than 12,000:
However Brewer's figures also show that the privileging of major literary authors can be overstated. For instance it is often claimed that for the Middle English period Chaucer's works were plundered for quotations to a much greater extent than other texts, and this has led to overstated claims concerning Chaucer's contribution to English vocabulary (see Mersand 1937 and Cannon 1998). However while Chaucer's works did yield a massive 11,902 quotations, other Middle English texts, such as the anonymous Cursor Mundi and the Wycliffite translation of the Bible provided greater numbers: 12,772 and 11,971 quotations respectively. As Brewer rightly points out, studies of this kind tell us more about lexicographical practice than the importance of such authors for the development of the language [[1]].
This seems to show that Cursor Mundi is the most-quoted Middle English work. Still, this doesn't compare with the estimate of 25,000 quotations as given on the O.E.D. web site, an estimate which includes the "various full and partial versions, and translations".
Lesgles 17:52 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)
According to "The Meaning of Everything", a book by Simon Winchester about the history of the OED, Cursor Mundi is the most quoted English work in the entire dictionary. Winchester is pretty meticulous about that sort of thing. I don't know why Shakespeare was removed as the most oft-quoted author though. – Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 20:16, Nov 3, 2004 (UTC)