Reasonable doubt, reasoned choice

A dictionary is a product of its age. ¹ The OED was delivered after a long and punishing labour of nearly five decades, grew robust with supplements in its miādle years, and has been reborn and reconfigured for the electronic age, made machine-readable and tagged. ² Now at the end of the twentieth century, scholars can run directed searches on the electronic version of the OED and have particular research questions answered with impressive thoroughness and speed. One statistic that is of great interest to us at the Dictionary of Old English project is the number of Old English words that survived beyond 1150, ³ and are therefore catalogued in the OED, but in more modern dress. It is a question that Sir James Murray might well have pondered, but would not have been able to answer unless he had spent many months going through the book which took more than his lifetime to write. Were he alive today, Murray would be able to search on the language tag <OE> in the etymology section of the OED entry, a search taking only a few seconds, and discover that there are slightly more than 8,600 headwords recorded in the OED as descended from Old English. ⁴ In this reconfigured universe, we can now go to etymologies to get words where before we could only go to words to get etymologies. Through directed searches, such as this, on electronic databases, digital memory enhances, or perhaps replaces, human memory in the performance of some complex tasks and many tedious ones. ⁵ Although the OED” s reputation as the finest historical dictionary of any language rests on its print version, ⁶ its electronic format now allows the full release of embedded information, thus giving us new worlds to explore. ⁷