Alison Waters is a publisher of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) at Oxford University Press. But if our meeting with her is any indication, she has to often field questions about the OED instead – its choice of the word of the year. (This year’s word is ‘selfie’.) Waters tells us how their is a long and intensely researched process to include new words in the dictionary.
A digital tool called ‘Incomings’ trawls the internet of the range of everyday English, jargon and their usage in context for new words. Only if a word has been found to have been used a specific number of times is it included, says Waters. Selfie is believed to have originated in 2002 in an Australian online forum where a user posted a picture of himself after hurting himself while in an inebriated condition. ‘Selfie’ had to go through a rigorous process to make it to the OED, and not just because “one drunk Australian said it”, quips Waters, who was in Chennai last week to participate in a seminar for English teachers on using dictionaries to help students better their writing.
The spread of the Internet is indeed a big challenge for all publishers of dictionaries and educational materials. Many online dictionaries are of low quality but “perfectly usable”, says Waters. All the same, that does not mean that printed dictionaries are over, because there are “logistical problems”. Not everyone has a laptop, or a broadband connection. And dictionary publishers have embraced the digital medium themselves, offering CDs and setting up Web sites.
There have been fewer copies of the OALD printed over the years but “it’s important to remember that digital does not have to be free”, says Waters. The OUP too offers a digital blended package, with a premium Web site and privileged access to some material. It has also started offering apps for mobile phones. At £25, just a little less expensive than the print version, “it is a best-seller”. “OUP has addressed the digital challenge quite well,” she adds.
Bilingual dictionaries India is one of the top 10 markets using OALD.com. It is a big market for the print version too. The free site gets three million unique visitors per month. Visitors spend at least 10 minutes on the site. China and African countries are big markets as well.
OUP produces several bilingual OALD dictionaries, in seven Indian languages as well as in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean, among others.
Oxford 3000 In India, the OALD costs Rs 625. Over 35 million people use it worldwide. How are the entries decided? The words in the OALD “are the most important words for learners to learn,” explains Waters. Armed with these, one can understand 85-95 per cent of general English. Those from the Oxford 3000 get in-depth treatment, with information on its usage, grammar and synonyms.
The Oxford 3,000 is a body of the most frequently occurring words in English, based on the information in the British National Corpus and the Oxford Corpus Collection. The rest are some very important words, not so frequently used but very familiar ones. These include parts of the body, words used in travel, and words which are useful to explain what you mean when you do not know the exact word for something. OUP’s editors consult with a panel of over 70 experts in the fields of teaching and language to include these words. Some words are demonstrated with pictures as well. Waters says the print edition is focused on enhancing writing skills as teachers say teaching and persuading students to write is the most difficult task.
Teaching grammar is a big challenge as well. Teachers also believe it is not right to encourage students to use Indian words, she says. OUP runs several programmes to train English language teachers.
But then, English is a changing, evolving language. Native speakers and second language speakers bestow on it an immense diversity. But “the language is policed and so is the grammar,” says Waters, who tells us that grammar is no longer studied in the UK and the US. The OED is the standard for grammar, but marks common, informal usage also.