A world war is an international conflict that involves most or all of the world's major powers . Conventionally, the term is reserved for two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945), although some historians have also characterised other global conflicts as world wars, such as the Nine Years' War , the War of the Spanish Succession , the Seven Years' War , the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars , the Cold War , and the War on Terror .
100-618: The Oxford English Dictionary cited the first known usage in the English language to a Scottish newspaper, The People's Journal , in 1848: "A war among the great powers is now necessarily a world-war." The term "world war" is used by Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels , in a series of articles published around 1850 called The Class Struggles in France . Rasmus B. Anderson in 1889 described an episode in Teutonic mythology as
200-457: A University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first edition in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, and provides ongoing descriptions of English language usage in its variations around the world. In 1857, work first began on the dictionary, though the first edition
300-448: A "world war" (Swedish: världskrig ), justifying this description by a line in an Old Norse epic poem, " Völuspá : folcvig fyrst I heimi" ("The first great war in the world"). German writer August Wilhelm Otto Niemann used the term "world war" in the title of his anti-British novel, Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume ( The World War: German Dreams ) in 1904, published in English as The Coming Conquest of England . The term "first world war"
400-748: A 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo , Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary , led by Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet ; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation . Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM ;
500-411: A fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s 6d. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles. Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary was first used. It then appeared only on
600-563: A peculiar way". Murray had American philologist and liberal arts college professor Francis March manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium and, by 1880, there were 2,500,000. The first dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on
700-499: A project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline." By 1989, the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the second edition of the OED, or
800-504: A race of exploration between the then most advanced European maritime powers, Portugal and Spain , during the 15th century. The initial impulse behind these dispersed maritime empires and those that followed was trade , driven by the new ideas and the capitalism that grew out of the European Renaissance . Agreements were also made to divide the world up between them in 1479 , 1493 , and 1494 . European imperialism
900-413: A title for his memoirs (published in 1920); he had noted his discussion on the matter with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University in his diary entry of September 10, 1918. The term "World War I" was coined by Time magazine on page 28 of its June 12, 1939, issue. In the same article, on page 32, the term "World War II" was first used speculatively to describe the upcoming war. The first use for
1000-414: A total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A–B , five for C , and two for E . Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which eventually became a volume break). At this point, it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments; once every three months beginning in 1895 there would be
1100-523: A wide selection of authors and publications. This influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works. According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, and 540 megabytes to store them electronically. As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing
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#17327580272091200-883: A widespread and prolonged fear of a potential third world war between nuclear-armed powers. It is often suggested that it would become a nuclear war , and be more devastating and violent than both the First and Second World Wars. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said in 1947 that "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." It has been anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities, and it has also been explored in fiction . Scenarios have ranged from conventional warfare to limited or total nuclear warfare. Various former government officials, politicians, authors, and military leaders (including James Woolsey , Alexandre de Marenches , Eliot Cohen , and Subcomandante Marcos ) have attempted to apply
1300-539: Is a collective of territories (often called colonies ), either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas , settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state. Before the expansion of early modern European powers, other empires had conquered and colonized territories, such as the Roman Empire in Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. Modern colonial empires first emerged with
1400-832: Is the Diccionario de la lengua española (produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy ), and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi Dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716. The largest dictionary by number of pages is believed to be the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal . The dictionary began as a Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to Oxford University ): Richard Chenevix Trench , Herbert Coleridge , and Frederick Furnivall , who were dissatisfied with
1500-486: Is the most-quoted female writer. Collectively, the Bible is the most-quoted work (in many translations); the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi . Additional material for a given letter range continued to be gathered after the corresponding fascicle was printed, with a view towards inclusion in a supplement or revised edition. A one-volume supplement of such material was published in 1933, with entries weighted towards
1600-904: Is the only conflict in which nuclear weapons have been used; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki , in the Japanese Empire , were devastated by atomic bombs dropped by the United States. The main Axis powers were Nazi Germany , the Empire of Japan , and the Kingdom of Italy ; while the United Kingdom , the United States , the Soviet Union and China were the " Big Four " Allied powers. Nazi Germany , led by Adolf Hitler ,
1700-470: The Los Angeles Times . Time dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest ", and Richard Boston , writing for The Guardian , called it "one of the wonders of the world ". The supplements and their integration into the second edition were a great improvement to the OED as a whole, but it was recognized that most of the entries were still fundamentally unaltered from the first edition. Much of
1800-917: The Americas ; Angola , Mozambique , Portuguese Guinea , and São Tomé and Príncipe (among other territories and bases) in the North and the Subsaharan Africa ; cities, forts or territories in all the Asian subcontinents, as Muscat , Ormus and Bahrain (amongst other bases) in the Persian Gulf ; Goa , Bombay and Daman and Diu (amongst other coastal cities) in India ; Portuguese Ceylon ; Malacca , bases in Southeast Asia and Oceania , as Makassar , Solor , Banda , Ambon and others in
1900-1105: The Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 "the World War of the 7th century" because it evolved into a war between the fourfold alliance of the Chinese Empire , the Western Turkic Khaganate , the Khazars , and the Byzantine Empire against a triple union of the Sasanian Empire , the Avars , and the Eastern Turkic Khaganate , with proxy conflicts in Afro-Eurasia (like the Aksumite–Persian wars ) and across
2000-654: The French , English , Dutch and Japanese empires. By the mid-17th century, the Tsardom of Russia , continued later as the Russian Empire , the Soviet Union , and modern Russia , became the largest contiguous state in the world and remains so to this day. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, by virtue of its technological and maritime supremacy, the British Empire steadily expanded to become by far
2100-838: The Moluccas , Portuguese Timor ; and the granted entrepôt -base of Macau and the entrepôt-enclave of Dejima ( Nagasaki ) in East Asia , amongst other smaller or short-lived possessions. During its Siglo de Oro , the Spanish Empire had possession of Mexico , South America , the Philippines , all of southern Italy , a stretch of territories from the Duchy of Milan to the Netherlands , Luxembourg , and Belgium , parts of Burgundy , and many colonial settlements in
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#17327580272092200-930: The Nine Years' War (1689–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). British historian John Robert Seeley dubbed all of those wars between France and Great Britain (later the UK) between 1689 and 1815 (including the American Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783) as
2300-520: The Nobel Prize in Physics ). Also in 1933 the original fascicles of the entire dictionary were re-issued, bound into 12 volumes, under the title " The Oxford English Dictionary ". This edition of 13 volumes including the supplement was subsequently reprinted in 1961 and 1970. In 1933, Oxford had finally put the dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However,
2400-659: The OED2 adopted the modern International Phonetic Alphabet . Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated . Following page 832 of Volume XX Wave -— Zyxt there's a 143-page separately paginated bibliography, a conflation of the OED 1st edition's published with the 1933 Supplement and that in Volume IV of the Supplement published in 1986. The British quiz show Countdown awarded
2500-399: The OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, but the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, whereas
2600-458: The OED2 was for the verb set , which required 60,000 words to describe some 580 senses (430 for the bare verb, the rest in phrasal verbs and idioms). As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the record was progressively broken by the verbs make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011 with 645 senses. Despite its considerable size, the OED is neither
2700-640: The OED2, was published. The first edition retronymically became the OED1 . The Oxford English Dictionary 2 was printed in 20 volumes. Up to a very late stage, all the volumes of the first edition were started on letter boundaries. For the second edition, there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with A , B.B.C. , Cham , Creel , Dvandva , Follow , Hat , Interval , Look , Moul , Ow , Poise , Quemadero , Rob , Ser , Soot , Su , Thru , Unemancipated , and Wave . The content of
2800-904: The Old World . Others consider that the Ottoman–Portuguese confrontations and Ottoman–Habsburg wars can be considered as world conflicts, prototypes of the " Great Game " in Eurasia and the Scramble for Africa , but between two main power-projecting and religious blocs, the Ottomans , as holders of the Muslim Caliphate , and the Habsburgs , as Holy Roman Emperor . However, the Americas and Oceania were not involved in those conflicts, in which case, other historians consider
2900-721: The Second Hundred Years' War , echoing an earlier period of conflict between France and England known as the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453). Some writers have referred to the American Revolutionary War alone as a world war. Others (like William R. Thompson or Chase-Dunn and Sokolovsky) also wants to include the Italian Wars and Dutch wars [ Dutch-Spanish and Anglo-Dutch Wars ] as part of Global Wars, while clasificating WW1 and WW2 as
3000-586: The Thirty Years' War and Eighty Years' War (specially Iberian–Dutch War ) as the first global conflict, pitting the Spanish and Portuguese Empires against the French , Dutch , and British Empires and their allies (mostly Protestants , like Danish and Swedish oversea expeditions) across the five continents. Another possible example is the Second Congo War (1998–2003) even though it
3100-552: The World Wide Web and new computer technology in general meant that the processes of researching the dictionary and of publishing new and revised entries could be vastly improved. New text search databases offered vastly more material for the editors of the dictionary to work with, and with publication on the Web as a possibility, the editors could publish revised entries much more quickly and easily than ever before. A new approach
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3200-467: The Yemeni civil war (2014–present), and their worldwide spillovers are sometimes described as proxy wars waged by the United States and Russia, which led some commentators to characterize the situation as a "proto-world war", with many countries embroiled in overlapping conflicts. The Seven Years' War (1754/56–1763) was fought across all of North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Most of
3300-556: The city-states they originated from, and thus did not constitute a colonial empire. This paradigm shifted by the time of the Ptolemaic Empire , the Seleucid Empire , and the Roman Empire . The European countries of the modern era that are most remembered as colonial empires are the United Kingdom , Spain , Portugal , Italy , Netherlands , France , Germany and Belgium . Portugal began establishing
3400-812: The "world war" terminology; for example, in French , "world war" is translated as guerre mondiale ; in German , Weltkrieg (which, prior to the war, had been used in the more abstract meaning of a global conflict); in Italian , guerra mondiale ; in Spanish and Portuguese , guerra mundial ; in Danish and Norwegian , verdenskrig ; in Russian , мировая война ( mirovaya voyna ); and in Finnish , maailmansota . The First World War occurred from 1914 to 1918. In terms of human technological history ,
3500-449: The 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached James Murray , who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing the dictionary. In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year. 20 years after its conception,
3600-497: The Americas, Africa, and Asia. Possessions in Europe, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean , the Americas, the Pacific Ocean , and East Asia qualified the Spanish Empire as attaining a global presence. From 1580 to 1640 the Portuguese Empire and the Spanish Empire were conjoined in a personal union of its Habsburg monarchs during the period of the Iberian Union , but beneath the highest level of government, their separate administrations were maintained. Subsequent colonial empires included
3700-412: The Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. He invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. The story of how Murray and Minor worked together to advance the OED was retold in the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman ), which was the basis for a 2019 film, The Professor and
3800-427: The English language continued to change and, by the time 20 years had passed, the dictionary was outdated. There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement of perhaps one or two volumes, but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for
3900-405: The Global German Wars , and the Coalition Wars with Wars of Louis XIV as the 2nd and 1st Global French Wars . However, other historians prefer to see all of those conflicts as "Hegemonic Wars" or "General Wars", been inter-regional wars on the grand scale, but not worldly. Other historians suggest even earlier conflicts to be world wars. For example, Russian ethnologist L. N. Gumilyov called
4000-462: The Madman , starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn . During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope. They had pages printed by publishers, but no publication agreement was reached; both the Cambridge University Press and the Oxford University Press were approached. The OUP finally agreed in 1879 (after two years of negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray) to publish
4100-453: The Materials Collected by The Philological Society ; the 352-page volume, words from A to Ant , cost 12 s 6 d (equivalent to $ 82 in 2023). The total sales were only 4,000 copies. The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work with unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were hired and two new demands were made on Murray. The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford to work full-time on
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4200-412: The OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888. In 1896, Bradley moved to Oxford University. Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business concerns – containing costs and speeding production – to the point where the project's collapse seemed likely. Newspapers reported
4300-497: The United States, more than 120 typists of the International Computaprint Corporation (now Reed Tech ) started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML . A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under
4400-507: The actual war came in its issue of September 11, 1939. One week earlier, on September 4, the day after France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad used the term on its front page, saying "The Second World War broke out yesterday at 11 a.m." Speculative fiction authors had been noting the concept of a Second World War in 1919 and 1920, when Milo Hastings wrote his dystopian novel, City of Endless Night . Other languages have also adopted
4500-434: The alphabet as before and updating "key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them". With the relaunch of the OED Online website in December 2010, alphabetical revision was abandoned altogether. The revision is expected roughly to double the dictionary in size. Apart from general updates to include information on new words and other changes in
4600-404: The colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX , was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo , in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz , an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in Time as saying "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of
4700-497: The combatants would strike at each other's colonies, thus spreading the wars far more widely than those of pre-Columbian times. War crimes were perpetrated in World War I. Chemical weapons were used in the war despite the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 having outlawed the use of such weapons in warfare. The Ottoman Empire was responsible for the Armenian genocide , during the First World War, as well as other war crimes. The Second World War occurred from 1939 to 1945 and
4800-401: The complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement. Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language and, through the supplement, the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield said that he broadened the scope to include developments of
4900-552: The conflict, many ethnic Germans were later expelled from Eastern Europe . Japan was responsible for attacking neutral nations without a declaration of war , such as the attack on Pearl Harbor . It is also known for its brutal treatment and killing of Allied prisoners of war and the inhabitants of Asia . It also used Asians as forced laborers and was responsible for the Nanjing Massacre in which 250,000 civilians were brutally murdered by Japanese troops. Noncombatants suffered at least as badly as or worse than combatants , and
5000-442: The dictionary and to pay Murray, who was both the editor and the Philological Society president. The dictionary was to be published as interval fascicles, with the final form in four volumes, totalling 6,400 pages. They hoped to finish the project in ten years. Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron outbuilding called the " Scriptorium " which was lined with wooden planks, bookshelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for
5100-441: The dictionary in Chicago, where he was a professor. The fourth editor was Charles Talbut Onions , who compiled the remaining ranges starting in 1914: Su–Sz , Wh–Wo , and X–Z . In 1919–1920, J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED , researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range; later he parodied the principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story Farmer Giles of Ham . By early 1894,
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#17327580272095200-408: The dictionary project finally had a publisher. It would take another 50 years to complete. Late in his editorship, Murray learned that one especially prolific reader, W. C. Minor , was confined to a mental hospital for (in modern terminology) schizophrenia . Minor was a Yale University-trained surgeon and a military officer in the American Civil War who had been confined to Broadmoor Asylum for
5300-440: The distinction between combatants and noncombatants was often blurred by the belligerents of total war in both conflicts. The outcome of the war had a profound effect on the course of world history . The old European empires collapsed or they were dismantled as a direct result of the crushing costs of the war and in some cases, their fall was caused by the defeat of imperial powers. The United States became firmly established as
5400-459: The dominant global superpower , along with its close competitor and ideological foe, the Soviet Union . The two superpowers exerted political influence over most of the world's nation-states for decades after the end of the Second World War. The modern international security, economic, and diplomatic system was created in the aftermath of the war. Institutions such as the United Nations were established to collectivize international affairs, with
5500-478: The earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use. Following each definition are several brief illustrating quotations presented in chronological order from the earliest ascertainable use of the word in that sense to the last ascertainable use for an obsolete sense, to indicate both its life span and
5600-443: The entry headwords , there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations ; 249,300 etymologies ; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations . The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (second edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in
5700-548: The existing English dictionaries. The society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844, but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries. In November, Trench's report was not a list of unregistered words; instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries , which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries: The society ultimately realized that
5800-410: The explicit goal of preventing another outbreak of general war. The wars had also greatly changed the course of daily life. Technologies developed during wartime had a profound effect on peacetime life as well, such as by advances in jet aircraft , penicillin , nuclear energy , and electronic computers . Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, there has been
5900-421: The finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having completed E–G , L–M , S–Sh , St , and W–We . By then, two additional editors had been promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing without much trouble. William Craigie started in 1901 and was responsible for N , Q–R , Si–Sq , U–V , and Wo–Wy. The OUP had previously thought London too far from Oxford but, after 1925, Craigie worked on
6000-450: The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available, and the online version has been available since 2000. By April 2014, it was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary is expected to be available exclusively in electronic form; the CEO of OUP has stated that it is unlikely that it will ever be printed. As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which
6100-428: The first global trade network and one of the first colonial empires under the leadership of Henry the Navigator . The empire spread throughout a vast number of territories distributed across the globe (especially at one time in the 16th century) that are now parts of 60 different sovereign states . Portugal would eventually control Brazil , territories such as what is now Uruguay and some fishing ports in north, in
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#17327580272096200-407: The following year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors. In 2016, Simpson published his memoir chronicling his years at the OED: The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary – A Memoir (New York: Basic Books). Thus began the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project. In
6300-402: The general public. Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the general public for help in providing citations for 50 selected recent words, and produced antedatings for many. The results were reported in a BBC TV series, Balderdash and Piffle . The OED ' s readers contribute quotations: the department currently receives about 200,000 a year. Colonial empire A colonial empire
6400-401: The great powers of the era participated, notably including the British Empire and French Empire , but polities from many continents played important roles. Some historians call it "World War Zero" as a result. Historians like Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig created a list of eight world wars, including the two generally agreed-upon world wars, the Seven Years' War, and five others:
6500-466: The harassment, particularly the Saturday Review , and public opinion backed the editors. Gell was fired, and the university reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt that the dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish. Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A–D , H–K , O–P , and T , nearly half
6600-582: The inauguration in June 2005 of the "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application ", or "Pasadena". With this XML -based system, lexicographers can spend less effort on presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. This system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and enabled staff in New York to work directly on the dictionary in the same way as their Oxford-based counterparts. Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage and email submissions of quotations by readers and
6700-422: The information in the dictionary published in 1989 was already decades out of date, though the supplements had made good progress towards incorporating new vocabulary. Yet many definitions contained disproven scientific theories, outdated historical information, and moral values that were no longer widely accepted. Furthermore, the supplements had failed to recognize many words in the existing volumes as obsolete by
6800-526: The intention of producing a third edition from them. The previous supplements appeared in alphabetical instalments, whereas the new series had a full A–Z range of entries within each individual volume, with a complete alphabetical index at the end of all words revised so far, each listed with the volume number which contained the revised entry. However, in the end only three Additions volumes were published this way, two in 1993 and one in 1997, each containing about 3,000 new definitions. The possibilities of
6900-413: The labels of the "Third World War" and the "Fourth World War" to various past and present global wars since the end of the Second World War, such as the Cold War and the war on terror respectively. During the early 21st century, the war in Afghanistan (2001–2021), the Arab Spring (2010–2012), the Syrian civil war (2011–present), the Iraq War (2003–2011), the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present),
7000-468: The language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom , including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. Burchfield also removed, for unknown reasons, many entries that had been added to the 1933 supplement. In 2012, an analysis by lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie revealed that many of these entries were in fact foreign loanwords, despite Burchfield's claim that he included more such words. The proportion
7100-488: The language, the third edition brings many other improvements, including changes in formatting and stylistic conventions for easier reading and computerized searching, more etymological information, and a general change of focus away from individual words towards more general coverage of the language as a whole. While the original text drew its quotations mainly from literary sources such as novels, plays, and poetry, with additional material from newspapers and academic journals,
7200-675: The largest empire in history; at its height ruling over a quarter of the Earth's land area and 24% of the population. Britain's role as a global hegemon during this time ushered in a century of " British Peace ", lasting from the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the start of World War I . During the New Imperialism , Italy and Germany also built their colonial empires in Africa . The chart below shows
7300-470: The leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series between its inception in 1982 and Series 63 in 2010. The prize was axed after Series 83, completed in June 2021, due to being considered out of date. When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. Author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century", as quoted by
7400-549: The letter M , with new material appearing every three months on the OED Online website. The editors chose to start the revision project from the middle of the dictionary in order that the overall quality of entries be made more even, since the later entries in the OED1 generally tended to be better than the earlier ones. However, in March 2008, the editors announced that they would alternate each quarter between moving forward in
7500-442: The new edition will reference more kinds of material that were unavailable to the editors of previous editions, such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters. John Simpson was the first chief editor of the OED3 . He retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt , who is the eighth chief editor of the dictionary. The production of the new edition exploits computer technology, particularly since
7600-526: The number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to a larger project. Trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed. On 7 January 1858, the society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary. Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. Later
7700-434: The outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else. The 125th and last fascicle covered words from Wise to the end of W and was published on 19 April 1928, and the full dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately. William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed dictionary, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
7800-660: The project, as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips were misplaced. Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate the quotations that the dictionary needed. As a result, he founded the Early English Text Society in 1864 and the Chaucer Society in 1868 to publish old manuscripts. Furnivall's preparatory efforts lasted 21 years and provided numerous texts for
7900-472: The project, which he did in 1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected in the back garden of his new property. Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling that he would accelerate his work pace with experience. That turned out not to be so, and Philip Gell of
8000-495: The quotation slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages. For instance, there were ten times as many quotations for abusion as for abuse . He appealed, through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, for readers who would report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in
8100-464: The same year, the society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles ( NED ). Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) played the key role in the project's first months, but his appointment as Dean of Westminster meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time that it required. He withdrew and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan
8200-554: The scale of World War I was enabled by the technological advances of the Second Industrial Revolution and the resulting globalization that allowed global power projection and mass production of military hardware. It had been recognized that the complex system of opposing military alliances (the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires against the British , Italian , Russian , and French Empires)
8300-399: The second supplement; Charles Talbut Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four volumes, starting with A , H , O , and Sea . They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing
8400-526: The start of the alphabet where the fascicles were decades old. The supplement included at least one word ( bondmaid ) accidentally omitted when its slips were misplaced; many words and senses newly coined (famously appendicitis , coined in 1886 and missing from the 1885 fascicle, which came to prominence when Edward VII 's 1902 appendicitis postponed his coronation ); and some previously excluded as too obscure (notoriously radium , omitted in 1903, months before its discoverers Pierre and Marie Curie won
8500-510: The time of the second edition's publication, meaning that thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use. Accordingly, it was recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin to rectify these problems. The first attempt to produce a new edition came with the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, a new set of supplements to complement the OED2 with
8600-497: The time since its desuetude, or to a relatively recent use for current ones. The format of the OED ' s entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects. The forerunners to the OED , such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch , had initially provided few quotations from a limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from
8700-423: The title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes. Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018. In 1988,
8800-461: The use and enjoyment of the general public, as well as crucial sources for lexicographers, but they did not actually involve compiling a dictionary. Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic, the volunteers were not well trained and often made inconsistent and arbitrary selections. Ultimately, Furnivall handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor. In
8900-422: The user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset , with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit
9000-661: The world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers ' dictionary of the German language , begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612; the first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish
9100-652: Was born out of competition between European Christians and Ottoman Muslims, the latter of which rose up quickly in the 14th century and forced the Spanish and Portuguese to seek new trade routes to India , and to a lesser extent, China. Although colonies existed in classical antiquity , especially amongst the Phoenicians and the ancient Greeks who settled many islands and coasts of the Mediterranean Sea , these colonies were politically independent from
9200-419: Was called for, and for this reason it was decided to embark on a new, complete revision of the dictionary. Beginning with the launch of the first OED Online site in 2000, the editors of the dictionary began a major revision project to create a completely revised third edition of the dictionary ( OED3 ), expected to be completed in 2037 at a projected cost of about £ 34 million. Revisions were started at
9300-431: Was completed, it was clear that the full text of the dictionary would need to be computerized. Achieving this would require retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching—as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this process began in 1983, and editorial work started
9400-409: Was estimated from a sample calculation to amount to 17% of the foreign loan words and words from regional forms of English. Some of these had only a single recorded usage, but many had multiple recorded citations, and it ran against what was thought to be the established OED editorial practice and a perception that he had opened up the dictionary to "World English". By the time the new supplement
9500-558: Was first used in September 1914 by German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel , who claimed that "there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word", citing a wire service report in the Indianapolis Star on 20 September 1914. In English, the term "First World War" had been used by Lieutenant Colonel Charles à Court Repington , as
9600-444: Was likely, if war broke out, to lead to a worldwide conflict. That caused a very minute conflict between two countries to have the potential to set off a domino effect of alliances, triggering a world war. The fact that the powers involved had large overseas empires virtually guaranteed that such a war would be worldwide, as the colonies' resources would be a crucial strategic factor. The same strategic considerations also ensured that
9700-517: Was not published In until 1884. It began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society . In 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in 10 bound volumes. In 1933,
9800-421: Was only waged on one continent. It involved nine nations and led to ongoing low-intensity warfare despite an official peace and the first democratic elections in 2006. It has been referred to as "Africa's World War". Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language , published by Oxford University Press (OUP),
9900-440: Was published and research was started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54 pigeon-hole grid. In April 1861, the group published the first sample pages; later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis , aged 30. Thereupon Furnivall became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but temperamentally ill-suited for the work. Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in
10000-534: Was responsible for genocides , most notably the Holocaust , which murdered demographics considered Untermensch by the Nazis. These included about six million Jews and about five million others, such as Slavs , Roma , homosexuals , and the physically and mentally disabled. The United States , the Soviet Union , and Canada deported and interned minority groups within their own borders and, largely because of
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