Dictionary in cyberspace

THE BREATHTAKING ADVANCE of science and technology will be leaving almost all disciplines in the stone age unless they keep pace with it. What newly emerges will have to be absorbed and what is becoming antediluvian be shed with the same readiness. The decision of the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary to go online reflects an awareness of the importance of cyberspace. (Incidentally, ``cyberspace'' does not find a place in the earlier editions of the Concise Oxford Dictionary which stop with ``cybernetics''). The liberal appropriation of words by the English language from other languages - this could perhaps be traced to the arrival of the English East India Company when its officials were assailed by words from the Indian languages which they had to learn fast for initially doing business in this country - should have in course of time led to their accommodation into English dictionaries. It was met by the OED with its mega twenty-volume publication of sixty million words.

With the OED going online, its website will have to provide for the words which are in general use and the others which lie buried in the twenty massive volumes which are browsed by researchers, scholars and the just curious. One can be quite sure that given that in the U.S., Britain and many other countries, including India, English is the only widely spoken and understood international language the number of new words borrowed from other languages will continue to increase at a very rapid rate. This will step up their number well beyond the 10,000 which the latest version of the OED is said to contain. If, as Dr. Jeremy Marshall, Associate Editor of the OED, has said, the flood of new words would lead to the revision of the dictionary by 2010, it should give an idea of how the dictionary would have to meet the demands for facilitating changes in both the spoken and written English in the years ahead. Technology advance which is continuously ushering in new machines and equipment has also led to an avalanche of new words and is making the availability of dictionaries of scientific and technical words a must for the professionals.

If the English language has been fully responsive to the expanding demands of science and technology, it is because of its readiness to pick out words from other languages when it has none which is either readily available or appropriate. A very large number of words which the botanist or the zoologist needs when he is writing or teaching in English have arrived from Latin or Greek. The OED has had to include them and as the pace of science and technology accelerates, the number of volumes it will need for the purpose will go well beyond the present twenty. This has made it imperative for the OED to have its own website which will be taking its contents to a world different from the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

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