Is it R.I.P. for the OED, paper version?

The fountainhead for all things about English could come to exist, like Johnny Depp in “Transcendence,” only in an online incarnation.

The English language has somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million words, and the Oxford English Dictionary is dedicated to bringing you the lineage and usage of every one of them.

The third edition is in the works, but that’s not headline news — it has been in development for at least 20 years. When it does appear, it could run to 40 volumes, twice as long as the second edition from only 35 years ago. And that could spell the last of anything but a virtual OED. There’s “too big to fail” and, maybe, “too big to print.”

The speed at which the language metastasizes has always made it hard for dictionaries to keep up. (Just take a gander at “Ball of Fire,” one of my favorite movies: Barbara Stanwyck plays a nightclub chanteuse, Gary Cooper a slang-deprived lexicographer.)

The first OED was published, in parts, starting in 1884, and it wasn’t done until 1928, by which time there were also many more words than there had been more than 40 years before.

That’s one of the glories of English: This immigrant country of ours takes immigrant words as its own and crafts new ones all the time to meet new realities of our lives. Five years ago, “selfie” would have been regarded as a badly misspelled “selfish.” More.

See: Los Angeles Times

Related Translation News article:

• RIP for OED as world’s finest dictionary goes out of print

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