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From the earliest days of the publication of the Dictionary it had been envisaged that a Supplement or Supplements might be necessary, in order to keep the historical record of the language up to date, and to take account of subsequent research into the vocabulary already covered by the Dictionary. This possibility had been kept in view not only by members of the Dictionary staff but also by a certain number of the regular ‘readers’ who maintained a continuous flow of contributions to the material from which the work was being compiled; moreover, communications of corrections and additions were constantly sent in by many interested users of the published work. Consequently, when the original Dictionary was completed in 1928, a great body of quotations had been amassed with a view to a Supplement on a grand scale, which should not only treat the new words and new meanings that had come into being during the publications of the successive sections of the Dictionary, but should also correct and amplify the evidence for what was already in print. It was soon discovered, however, that such a Supplement, if it were to be at all a worthy and adequate addition to the main work, would demand intensive research by experienced workers extending over many years. This course could not be contemplated when the possibility of preparing a Supplement was considered as work drew to an end on the original Dictionary.
It was therefore resolved to produce a supplementary volume, the scope of which would in the main be restricted to the treatment of those accessions of words and senses which had taken place during the preceding fifty years. To this limitation there were to be two principal exceptions: items of modern origin and contemporary currency that had been either intentionally or accidentally omitted from the Dictionary would be included, and account would be taken of earlier evidence for American uses, which Sir William Craigie, at that time editing the Dictionary of American English in Chicago, was in a position to supply. Temporary or casual uses were recognized only in so far as they marked stages in the recent history of scientific discovery, invention, or fashion, or illustrated the progress of thought, usage, or custom during the half-century then under review. A few important corrections or amplifications of existing definitions were introduced under the necessity of bringing the work into line with recent research. The details of this policy were established by Dr C. T. Onions, under whose editorship the first Supplement to the OED was published in 1933.
The chief characteristics of the vocabulary set forth in the 1933 Supplement can be summarized briefly: on the technical side, it exhibited the great enlargement of the terminology of the arts and sciences at the close of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth - biochemistry, radio telegraphy and telephony, mechanical transport on land, at sea, and in the air, psychoanalysis, the cinema, to name a few outstanding subjects; on the purely linguistic side, the varied development of colloquial idiom and slang, to which the United States of America had made a large contribution, but in which the British dominions and dependencies of the time also contributed a conspicuous share. As in the main work, there was continually present the problem of the inclusion or omission of the more esoteric scientific terms and of the many foreign words reflecting the widened interest in the conditions and customs of distant countries; it was acknowledged that the problem had not been satisfactorily and comprehensively solved in every instance, as the material from which the Supplement was compiled had been collected principally while the original Dictionary was still in preparation, and following the same guidelines in operation during that work. In one respect the 1933 Supplement went somewhat beyond the limits of the main Dictionary, in its more generous inclusion of proper names; but even so, these were not admitted unless they had some allusive interest or were important for some linguistic, literary, or historical reason.
The result was a Supplement of over 800 pages which went far towards completing the documentation of the English language up to the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century and just beyond. However, extensive though it was, it still represented only a restricted selection from a large collection of material from which a much larger volume might have been produced. Once it had been completed, the OED team dispersed, and the editorial staff, including the last surviving Editor of the original Dictionary still in Oxford, Dr C. T. Onions, turned to other work. The OED library in Oxford was broken up, and quotation slips that had not been used were stored away, some later to be dispatched to other historical dictionary projects, notable for use in the preparation of the Middle English Dictionary at Ann Arbor, Michigan and the projected dictionary of Early Modern English.
After the Second World War the Delegates of the University Press decided to re-establish a headquarters for the Dictionary in Oxford, and to prepare a revised version of the 1933 Supplement. In the end, this proved to be an even greater work than that which circumstances had forbidden in 1928, an addition to the main Dictionary of one-third of its size, taking almost thirty years to prepare. But this was not foreseen at the time. The original intention was simply to amplify the existing Supplement in a single-volume work of some 1,275 pages which would take account of the lexical development in English throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In 1957, R. W. Burchfield, a New Zealander who was then Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, and formerly a Rhodes Scholar at the University, accepted the invitation of the Delegates to edit the Supplement. It was envisaged that this new Supplement would take about seven years to complete.
At this stage, the editorial office of the Dictionary was located on one floor of a private house, No. 40 Walton Crescent, adjacent to the University Press’s printing works and to the Clarendon Press itself. The presence in Oxford of Dr C. T. Onions provided valuable continuity between the OED and the projected new Supplement, and at the time it was still possible for the editor to receive the advice and encouragement of a small number of people who had worked on or for the Dictionary in other capacities. However, the lapse of some twenty years since the disbanding of the original OED staff meant that one of the first duties incumbent on the new editor was the selection and training of new assistants. In the days of the Dictionary itself, Sir James Murray had often found the recruitment of suitable staff to be a problematic and uncertain affair, and so it proved again. Gradually, though, the initial difficulties began to subside, and early work in the preparation of the new Supplement began to take a steadier course.
The raw material for a dictionary on historical principles - a file of quotations excerpted from the literature of the period treated - was almost entirely lacking. Among the material left behind after work on the 1933 Supplement there was indeed a collection of quotations numbering about 140,000, few of which had appeared in the Supplement itself, which included illustrative examples of words excluded in 1933 because they were not fully established at the time. Though useful, these materials fell far short of what was needed, both in quantity and range: the whole literature of the eventful quarter-century since 1933 had to be sifted from scratch. In 1957 an extensive reading programme was inaugurated, covering printed sources of all kinds relating to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century English. The sources included all the important literary works, as well as many hundreds of popular titles, a wide range of scientific books and journals, and large numbers of newspapers and periodicals, ranging from the national press to the publications of the ‘underground’. Numerous works containing lexicographical information, such as Notes and Queries, American Speech, and many dictionaries of regionalisms, slang, jargon, and technical language, were converted into the form of dictionary slips. In addition, several valuable private collections were submitted to the Press, and these were also added to the quotation files. Thanks to these and subsequent valuable donations, to the comprehensiveness of the reading programme, to the alertness of the departmental staff in their private reading, and to the regular contributions of scholars and voluntary readers, the quotation file grew to contain at least two million, and possibly three million, slips by the time of the completion of the Supplement, and proved an excellent resource from which to make the initial selection of items for inclusion in the dictionary and from which to document the history of each term up to the present day.
At the same time it was necessary to build up a reference library of books in the department to which staff could turn for additional information about items for which entries were being prepared. Some volumes from the 1933 Supplement library were brought together again, and a further 7,000 or so books, especially dictionaries, were gradually acquired by the department. These consisted of books and periodicals dealing with the development of English in Great Britain, America, the Commonwealth, and elsewhere; a large collection of dictionaries (both English and bilingual), volumes on slang, dialect, etymology, and as many of the subject areas treated by the dictionary as it was convenient to house in the editorial offices, besides many of the novels, plays, and collections of published diaries and letters, which had been ‘read’ for the dictionary’s quotation file and were at hand when quotations included in the dictionary needed checking.
By the early 1960s, it was clear that the development of the English language throughout the world had been much more rapid than either the Delegates of the Press or the Editor of the Supplement had at that time considered, and that the Supplement would occupy many more pages than had been originally intended. The paramount importance of reassessing the projected size of the Supplement had been highlighted by the publication in 1961 of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which illustrated dramatically the proliferation of new vocabulary in North America and Great Britain in the early and mid-twentieth century. Webster’s Second had appeared just one year after the earlier OED Supplement, in 1934, and offered a perfect basis for comparison in terms of the rate of change in the language, bringing home sharply to the Editor and his staff the necessity of improving considerably the OED’s own coverage of American English, and, pari passu, other overseas varieties of English. The original plans were revised to allow for a Supplement spanning three (and eventually four) volumes, concentrating much more extensively on the vocabulary of North America, the West Indies, Australia, and the other English-speaking countries of the world. The Editor drew a parallel between the current state of affairs on the Supplement and Dryden’s remarks in the Preface to the Fables (1700):
’Tis with a Poet, as with a Man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the Cost beforehand: But, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his Account, and reckons short of the Expence he first intended: He alters his Mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that Convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began.8
A substantial research base had been built up by the mid-1960s. Besides assistant editors and researchers in Oxford, the Supplement soon had permanent members of staff working as researchers in the major libraries in London and Washington, and links with language centres and with other libraries throughout the world. A panel of specialist consultants was established to read and comment on individual entries in galley proof, and another panel of scholars and writers to read through continuous sections of galley proof with a critical eye. A radical departure from the policy adopted by the editors of the original Dictionary was the appointment from 1968 of graduates in scientific subjects, who took general responsibility for the drafting of entries in these disciplines. The necessity of taking this step had been impressed on the Editor as a result of his visit to the editorial offices of Merriam-Webster in 1967. Editorial work on the Supplement began in earnest in 1964, and the first instalment of copy (A-alpha) was delivered to the University Printer on 27 May 1965. From this point until the completion of the Supplement editorial staff were involved simultaneously in the preparation of copy for press, and in dealing with proofs. At first the University Printer, and subsequently (with considerable overlap) Messrs. William Clowes and Son. Ltd., of Colchester, and, in the final stages, Latimer Trend Ltd., of Plymouth, were engaged in the typesetting of the Supplement.
The first volume of the Supplement (A-G) was published in 1972, and immediately established itself as a worthy sequel to the original Dictionary. Soon after its publication the Editor was honoured with the title of Commander of the British Empire for his services to scholarship. The dictionary was fortunate in attracting the interest of several scholars who began by reviewing the work in the academic press, and then became valuable consultants to the dictionary itself. Gradually more staff were appointed to the work of completing the Supplement, and by the mid-seventies some twenty-five people were involved in one or other editorial task, drafting the initial entries, reviewing the work of assistants, verifying bibliographical information, or conducting essential library research. The second volume (H-N), in which was included a dedication of the whole work to Her Majesty the Queen, appeared in 1976; by this time the editorial offices of the Dictionary were no longer large enough to contain the expanding number of staff, quotations, and research materials necessary for its preparation. Furthermore, the scope of the Dictionary department had expanded under the Chief Editorship of Dr Burchfield to include not simply work on the Supplement, but also the compilation and revision of the other Oxford Dictionaries, and for a time, a number of bilingual dictionaries as well. The department removed, therefore, to more extensive offices in St Giles’, Oxford, in 1978; 1982 saw the publication of the third volume (O-Scz); and the Supplement was completed after twenty-nine years of editorial effort with the publication of the final volume in 1986.
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