Like never before, words and their definitions are incredibly easy to access through any number of free, exhaustive sources. So why would anyone, anywhere pay for an online dictionary?
In particular, I'm talking about the Oxford English Dictionary, widely respected as one of the best, if not the best, dictionary of the English language in the world. According to the OED website, the New York Times has called it "the greatest work in dictionary making ever undertaken."
Now I love the OED as much as the next geek. In college, I'd use our library's subscription to peruse the endless etymologies, examples, and sentences of words I'd hardly ever heard of. But it nonetheless baffled me why my school or any other would pay $300 a year or better for access to the OED online. [US$295 is the going rate for an individual yearly subscription; the rates for institutions aren't available to the public.] Libraries already spend astronomical subscription fees for journals, which students actually use for research. I may have been one of the only students to ever use my alma mater's subscription. In four years, I never saw or heard reference to the revered compendium in a single paper or presentation from my peers.
The Internet has a glut of free online dictionaries. Here are just a few examples. Merriam-Webster, the OED's upstart American rival, offers its full catalog of words in an ad-supported version. The creators of Wikipedia have brought us Wiktionary, for the ultimate crowd-sourced definitions. By virtue of its name, Dictionary.com likely receives the most traffic of the bunch. The One Look dictionary provides the curious logophile with a number of ways to look up the same word, each providing different results. In a particularly poignant example, Cambridge University's entire set of dictionaries can also be found online free of charge. And lastly, the favorite of the tech-savvy set, the Urban Dictionary provides a great deal of recent words and idioms that the OED wouldn't dare touch.
All of these dictionary services provide free definitions that, though they may not have the gravitas of the OED, constitute just as helpful a service in scope. This alone would be enough to point out the OED's failing to hold on to its revered position, but there's a bigger point to be made here. The dictionary, even the online dictionary, as an independent entity is a non sequitur in the age of the Internet. The Internet itself is the biggest, most complete, easiest to use dictionary in the history of mankind.
Need a definition, etymology, correct spelling, or usage? Type the word you're looking for into Google or Bing. Search engines will scour the entire Internet for the word, not just limited entries moderated by a small group of people. Any dictionary's services pale in comparison to the power of a simple search engine. Facing this fact, any online or print dictionary is redundant or worse. And a for-pay online dictionary is nothing short of absurd.
FWIW, the Compact OED is on-line, free.
ReplyDeletePractically all the dictionaries you cite are based, in whole or in part, on the OED. The OED, besides defining current and archaic meanings, explores the origin of a word back to its beginning appearance in Europe (and sometimes elsewhere). Any who do not cite the OED when discussing English are not exploring the subject thoroughly.
Further, 'crowd-source' is just another term for 'error and bias.' A small group of people who know what they are doing, can prove it on demand, and defend any decision on demand, is supremely preferable to a whole bunch of people who can't be found.
For spelling and simple definitions, on-line is certainly preferable, maybe indispensable, but for really researching the language, the OED is the only starting point.
To say that Merriam-Webster is the US 'rival' to the OED is to say Macy's is the 'rival' of Harrods. There is only a superficial resemblance, and minimal overlap of market.
M-W and others *tried* paid on-line models and abandoned them. People are paying to use the on-line OED. Despite the huge number of free avenues to some of the information, the OED remains the single best source for densely researched information, and accompanying citations of sources, on the language.
BTW, your commenting process is, u-m-m, flaky. Would not accept URL, saying it contained 'illegal characters,' when, in fact, they are only a bit amoral. So, I went Anon.
Thanks for your comment; I'm sorry the system isn't working well for you. This blog is hosted by Google's Blogger, so I don't have a lot of control over the commenting system, but I'll look into it.
ReplyDeleteI admit I didn't know about the Compact OED, but that's a step in the right direction.
As I said in the article, I believe the OED to be an incredible source of information. Those who compile the dictionary are truly scholarly, and I've personally benefited from their insight. That being said, I was intentionally a little inflammatory in the article if for no other reason than to point out that $300 dollars is a bit too steep to pay for such a source in the information age.
The services that once only experienced scholars were capable of providing can now be accessed by common people in a very effective way. Maybe not to precisely the same quality, but certainly in a general sense.
That doesn't mean the OED should be eliminated or denigrated. It's one of the best dictionaries out there. It just needs to realize the big picture: it's no longer competing against just other dictionaries, but against the Internet as a whole.
Again, thanks for the rebuttal! I always welcome the chance to have a little discussion.
Apparently, Chuck Klosterman discovered Val Kilmer loves the OED. Thing is, since Google doesn't allow users to paste URLs in this comment, to discover for yourself how Klosterman figured this out, you'll have to click my username as Google WOULD let me paste the URL in as my own. Odd. This is not a trick.
ReplyDelete