ABSTRACT
Richard Venezky, to whom this essay is dedicated, once described the designing of software systems for a scholarly dictionary as akin to preparing a spaceship for a journey to a distant galaxy in outer space (Venezky, 1987, p. 113). As he noted, such a project certainly encompasses many technological generations and perhaps more than one biological generation. The example of the print Middle English Dictionary (MED) may be instructive. In 1930 when the MED began, an American astronomer at Flagstaff, Clyde William Tombaugh, discovered Pluto, the ninth and, so far, the last planet in our solar system; British engineer Frank Whittle was the first to invent and patent the jet engine; Johannes Ostermeier, a German, patented the flashbulb for the camera; and a Canadian research student, William Chalmers, developed the lightweight thermoplastic polymer we still know today as Plexiglas (Ochoa & Corey, 1997, pp. 238-240). By 2001, when the MED was completed at the mature age of 71 (Lewis, 2002), man had not only viewed his universe through a telescope but had long since walked on the moon; jets had become the usual means of transport for ordinary people traveling great (and sometimes, little) distances; satellites were capable of beaming back photographs taken by cameras on Mars; and significant parts of our lives are lived not so much with the concreteness of polymers and plastics but with the virtual reality of the World Wide Web.
