Free OED

For Hugh Kenner, the Oxford English Dictionary was the nineteenth-century’s masterwork: it was the cultural expression of that century’s ‘dominant science’, philology, just as Paradise Lost had provided an epic expression to the seventeenth-century preoccupation with theology, and as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall expressed the dominance, in the eighteenth-century, of history. (In the twentieth century, “psychology and sociology, and an epical novel entitled Ulysses“.)

The past feeds into the present; the nineteenth century’s dominant science informs the twenty-first century’s. A guy called Tim Bray (who incidentally is really into modernism, and who I remember enthusiastically discussing Ezra Pound with—Pound, of course, was Kenner’s #1 subject—on an email discussion list) worked on the OED at Waterloo University. A computer scientist, Bray helped to create the information system that made the organisation of the OED 2nd edition’s vast corpus possible. Entries could be marked up using a special language, with tags to describe what kind of data went where. From this experience, he went on to co-create eXtensible Markup Language, XML, which is now implicated in just about everything you do with your mouse and keyboard. Certainly it’s important for the twenty-first century’s dominant science, programming, and it’s epic expression, the World Wide Web.

Anyway, the point of all this is that for the next few days only, thanks to some OUP/BBC conspiracy, you can have free access to the 21st century version of the OED. Best website ever.

[Link to free OED] [Kenner on Philology] [Bray on the OED]

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Author:
Tom
Published:
25.01.06 / 2pm
Category:
General
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