An interactive guide to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary

The first edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary was published in June 1911, the month of George V’s coronation and a few weeks after the launching of the Titanic. A hundred years later the twelfth, centenary edition is being published in August 2011.

Throughout the intervening century, with two world wars and enormous changes in society,
technology, language, and life, the Concise has been a trusted guide to English for millions
of people – and has faithfully recorded how our language has evolved and developed.

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In the autumn of 1906 Henry Watson Fowler, a former schoolmaster and already co-author with his brother Frank of The King’s English (OUP, May 1906), received an invitation from the Press to edit a small dictionary with his brother. It was to be based on the Oxford English Dictionary, which was then in preparation. At this time the OED, under its chief editor James Murray, had reached the letter M.

It was planned that when the brothers got to parts of the alphabet as yet unpublished they could use the wealth of information already organized in the extensive OED files.

Five years later, the Concise – this “small dictionary” – which had quickly overtaken the OED, was published.

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A facsimile edition of this classic text has been published to mark its centenary.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary was different from earlier dictionaries – it was designed as a dictionary of current English. Fowler said that he wanted to present ‘as vivid a picture … of the English that was being spoken and written at the time’.

The dictionary was revolutionary for its coverage of slang and informal English. In the preface the editors wrote ‘we admit colloquial, facetious, slang, and vulgar expressions with freedom…’

Some examples of slang terms from 1911:

Flapper: girl not yet out [i.e., presented to society]

Footle: trifle, play the fool

Foozle: do clumsily, bungle, make a mess of

Hum: sham, hoax

Piffle: talk or act feebly, trifle

Slapping: very big, good, or fast

Squiffer: a concertina

top-hole: first-rate

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There was no doubt that the Fowlers had achieved a triumph. A review of the time called the book ‘a marvel of condensation, achieved by skilful hands’.

The challenging process of distilling the vast OED into a much smaller format was achieved by
the ‘curtest possible treatment’ of both ‘uncommon words’ and words which were ‘fitter for the
encyclopaedia than the dictionary’ and by the exclusion of obsolete words, unless they were from the Bible.

The mammoth task was summarized by Henry Fowler’s letter of May 1907 where he wrote that
‘the perpetual struggle between the quart and the pint pot is having serious effects on our
literary style and the color [sic] of our hair; but we are maintaining it gallantly.’

The great dictionary begun in 1884 was finally completed in 1928, seventeen years after the Concise.

For more on the history of the OED click here.

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In 1911 the text of the dictionary was typed or handwritten on paper and then designed and typeset
using a separate piece of metal type for each letter. One-piece plates (‘electroplates’) were then
created from the type, and the pages of the book were printed from the plates.

Changes to the printed text were extremely costly, since new plates had to be made. So, for this
reason revised editions of the Concise were published with an ‘Addenda’, an A–Z section of new words
and phrases printed at the end of the main text.

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Over the next five decades the Concise was updated regularly and saw five new editions.
But the dictionary was still essentially Fowler’s dictionary, with the addition of some new words and phrases.

For the sixth edition work on the dictionary was brought in-house at OUP’s headquarters. Rather than being compiled by a single editor, the book had several editors who now worked even more closely with the OED editorial team. This meant they could benefit from the active reading programme, to identify and collect quotations for new words and phrases, which is still a key feature of the Oxford English Dictionary project today.

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In the 1980s the dictionary was once again at the forefront of change – new methods of text management and production had been developed and the Concise was one of the first titles for which material was keyed into PCs and stored electronically rather than on handwritten slips of paper.

Soon after this a brand new dictionary – the Oxford Dictionary of English – was created. This was the
first dictionary to be fully based on evidence of how language is really used – using a huge database of
evidence – a corpus. Find out more about the development of the Oxford English Corpus.

The tenth edition of the Concise was derived from this new dictionary of current English rather than from previous editions of the Concise.

A dictionary is the natural choice and place to turn to for help and inspiration for puzzles and spelling
competitions, and the Concise has a long history of association with word games.

In the 1930s spelling bees were held based on its contents. The flyer in the image above is for a Spelling Bee, to be held at the Palace, Reading, c.1933. And in 1982 the Concise was the authority for Countdown’s Dictionary Corner’ when the programme was first launched.

The photograph shows Susie Dent with guest Nigel Rees and the Concise in ‘Dictionary Corner on the programme.

Taking us forward to the next 100 years…

The dictionary has recently seen even more changes. Now titled the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, it is now edited online, which means that the dictionary database can be updated by editors all over the world. And lexicographers continue to deploy modern linguistic theory and the latest technology including the Oxford English Corpus to monitor and record our changing language.

Judy Pearsall reflects on the Concise in today’s world:

And yet, despite the newness of the lexical approach and the newness of the text, the essential character
of the Concise OED—brief, unfussy, practical definitions for all the core words and meanings in English—remains, and flourishes today in this centenary 12th edition.’