Big Ideas

It’s no lie, I really like the podcast experience. Today I was listening to Big Ideas, a lecture by Simon Winchester on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I never knew the history of the dictionary would be that interesting, but it was. Did you know that in 1985 the University of Waterloo helped realphabatize the dictionary? and in 1995 they begun to work on the 3rd edition of the dictionary begining with the letter “O”. Twelve years later and they’re only on the letter “M”. The third edition will be 40 volumes, weight 1/6th of a ton, have 980,000 words in it and be completed sometime in June 2037.

Facinating stuff.

I wrote this on 7 June 07 when I was feeling .

Comment

  1. tiff says,

    i know what to get you for your wedding. mwahaha

    My prof is convinced that Oxford dictionary can beat up Webster. We had this dicussion two days ago when he went into this rant about how much better it is…now i’m really interested to know why.

  2. ramanan says,

    A couple of my profs were heavily involved with that stuff. I am pretty sure the company OpenText has its roots with that project as well. (Now they make intranet software or some junk like that.)

 
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