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November 22, 2008 3:34:57 CST



Has It Gone, Or Just Gone Online?

Posted May 11, 08 5:06 PM CDT in Arts & Living Technology 

(Newser) – The Oxford English Dictionary—the 3-volume one with the magnifying glass—has ditched its hard copy and gone digital for good, which makes one "bookish middle-class" writer nervous. "Other totemic college books could go out of style, maybe," Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times. But "the OED was forever. Wasn’t it?"

She asks if there is even a place for scholarly dictionaries in our golden age of Wikipedia, online thesauruses, and spell check. Looking up OED online, Heffernan finds usage hints, often with quotations, that save her from subtle but painful errors. Even though the OED's venerable hard copy, first printed in 1928, feels long gone, its online version easily trumps the web's quickie lexicons.

Source New York Times

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The print in the hard copy versions of the OED is so small that the dictionary came equipped with a magnifying glass.   (Shutterstock)
With spell check and Wikipedia, some believe the dictionary is obsolete.   (Shutterstock)
The OED will no longer appear in print. All updates and content will be uploaded to OED.com.   (Shutterstock)
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