ABSTRACT
The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary, first published 1884–1928, is the most comprehensive dictionary of historical English ever to have been produced, recording words and senses in English from around 1150 to the early twentieth century, with accompanying quotations illustrating every period of use. Although twice supplemented with more recent vocabulary and re-issued in 1989, the original dictionary remained unaltered until 2000, when a major new version started to appear in quarterly online instalments comprising both revised and new material. Over 20 years later, the revision is half-way complete, but the publishers’ decision to merge revised with unrevised entries, in an entirely modern medium, has given rise to the emergence of ghosts from the past: up-to-the-minute scholarship sits alongside relics of outdated social and linguistic views (e.g. on race, class, gender, sexuality, and including the appropriateness of citing female authors as quotation sources). The continued existence of such ghosts illustrates how hard it is for cultural entities to shed former identities and invent themselves anew: past ways of making, being, and thinking continue to shape (and sometimes shackle) their equivalent forms in the present.
