ABSTRACT
The World Wide Web represents a vast sea of data that lexicographers can search for evidence of word usage, or indeed for new words and new uses of words. The Oxford University Press dictionaries department, for example, has compiled the over 2-billion-word Oxford English Corpus from the Internet for this purpose. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online is integrated with Historical Thesaurus of English. Also facilitated by the electronic medium is cross-referencing; a cross-reference within an entry is now only a click away; and some online dictionaries allow the user to click on a word within a definition to be taken to the entry for that word. Involving the public in compilation of dictionary has a long history, especially for a dictionary like OED, whose editors recruited 'readers' from across the English-speaking world to participate in the dictionary's reading programme and send in to the editor slips of paper with quotations illustrating the meanings of words taken from their reading.
