Oxford English Dictionary

Hello, everyone! This is Bren Antrim. I’m one of the reference librarians here at Santa Monica College. Today we’re going to do a tour of the Oxford English Dictionary database. The way that you get to that from the SMC homepage is to click on the Menu. Click on the plus sign next to Student Support and that will open up the sub-menu. From there, go to Library between Counseling and Tutoring From there, you scroll down in the page, and below the Databases button, notice the Ask a Librarian button.

Research assistance is available to you 24 7 00:37 - through this button. We will chat with you if you are stuck in your search, and get you unstuck! In order to get to the Oxford English Dictionary database, click on the Databases button and go into the All Databases listing. This is a listing of all the databases that SMC subscribes to, alphabetically listed by title, with a short description of what’s in each database. Oxford English Dictionary is used by many English classes and Linguistics classes here at SMC. It’s also - if you’re a word fan - a fun place to go and find out about the etymology, or origin and change in meaning over time, of various words in the English language.

Finally, it is 01:25 - considered the official dictionary of the English language, both for history and current usage. So as we scroll down through the databases to the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll notice we have more than one Oxford database. We have art and music and reference, so we’re going to go into the OED. Before we do a search let me show you a little bit about the database. You can look through the dictionary as you would any standard English language dictionary, A through Z, to find your word.

You can also look for words by how they’re used, 02:12 - by the topic of the word, by where the word comes from, or when and where it originated. Timelines allows you to search for when particular words entered the English language, or browse and see what came in during the Black Plague, and what came in during the Age of Enlightenment, and what came in during the Age of Exploration, etc. You can explore the top authors and works that are quoted in the OED, and finally you can use the historical thesaurus, which is an organization, taxonomically, of all of the contents of the OED. Down here, it tells you a little bit more about it, including video guides for the OED. I believe this was more important for the print version than the online version, but it’s no longer being published in print, so the database is what we have left.

So if, for an example, you are given 03:13 - an assignment to find the origin and the change in meaning over time of a particular word. You can come here to the Oxford English Dictionary and type in that word, and when you search for it, it will tell you the different meanings, in various grammatical constructs as a transitive verb, an intransitive verb, the linguistical intransitive verb, and within those entries, it will tell you first how to pronounce it, next how often it’s used, next where it came from, and then it will actually trace where the word showed up in written sources of the English language - going back from 1653 all the way to 2013. This, used as a transitive verb, helps to make something better or make something less bad, first showed up in 1653, and has been in current if not great usage to the current day. As an intransitive verb, to become better or improve, it entered the language a little bit later and is less often used. And finally, amelioration or the intransitive version of this word used in linguistics, much less often used, but it links to the specific works where it was found.

So if 04:57 - your teacher ever tells you, you need to find out where this word came from, give me its etymology, the Oxford English Dictionary is the place to go. In addition and for fun, there are various categories that you can look for words: you can look for usage of different types of words; you can look for regions from which words came; you can look for the origin of specific words; or even if you’re looking for. for example. words in the English language that came from Native American languages, it will list those North and South American languages. You can look for timelines to see when specific words came in, or just to browse and see what kinds of words came in, for example, during the 1500s, or during the 1300s, or during the 1700s. I would not necessarily have guessed that the phrase open-minded is over 300 years old, for example.

06:05 - Then you can look at the sources to find out where they’re getting this information from, and it links this is the Times of London, the various sources that it used and the dates from which the words came. So for example, the Times of London publishing from 1788 and still today - that’s why there’s no date on the other end of the dash - has given a total of over 43,000 quotations, and has ‘first evidence of word’ coming all the way back to 1710, and the ‘first evidence for that sense’ in seven, almost eight thousand words. Then as you’ll see, they come from literature, they come from newspapers, they come from magazines, they come from journals, they come from individuals of note in particular fields, authors, or scientists, or economists, philosophers… So this database is particularly useful for Linguistics classes, is often assigned in English classes, and is quite honestly just pure fun to play with. If you have any questions as you go, please use the Ask a Librarian button on the Library homepage. Good luck with your search, and be well. .