The OED Has a New Look

An entry on the new OED user interface

30 July 2023

The Oxford English Dictionary Online has undergone a major facelift. It’s still the same dictionary; the data is unchanged, but the user interface and the look and feel of the website is significantly different. I’ve seen a lot of kvetching by regular users of the dictionary about the changes, but on the whole, I think it’s a superb update, well thought out and executed.

My first reaction was horror, though. All too often, sites and software packages undergo revisions without any reason behind them, moving icons around the page for no apparent reason, etc. But after using the new OED for a week, I’ve come to embrace the changes.

For those who have never used it, the Oxford English Dictionary is without question the most comprehensive and best researched dictionary of the English language, if not any language. Its entries contain usage citations that outline a word’s history. If the OED has a significant drawback, it’s that it is so large and its editorial standards are so high, that it is slow to update. The editors do an admirable job with the resources at hand, but like an oil tanker, it is slow to change course. But with this change the dictionary has made a major course correction, at least in its user interface.

First and foremost, the new OED site works well with smartphones. The old site was clunky and hard to read on a small screen, but the new site is designed to function easily on a phone. I don’t know what the OED’s usage statistics are, but 72% of the visits to Wordorigins.org are from smartphones. I imagine the OED’s statistics are similar, and the dictionary should not ignore huge swaths of its user base. I do most of my work at a computer, with two screens and a mouse, but I occasionally use my phone to do a quick look up of a word, and the experience with the old interface was terrible, almost unusable. The new one is far superior on a phone or tablet.

The second big change is the dictionary’s site now has a tabbed view as default. The tabs are:

• Factsheet (a quick overview of the entry; technically not a tab but either a landing page or a pop-up window if you are logged in)

• Meaning & Use (definitions)

• Pronunciation

• Forms

• Frequency

• Compounds & Derived Words

Users without a paid subscription (either individual or through an institution) have access to only the Factsheet. Subscribers who are not logged in also get the Factsheet as their landing page when they search for a word. Subscribers who are logged in get the Meaning & Use tab, the one with the definitions, as their landing page. And when one arrives at the Meaning & Use page, the usage citations are compressed by default, with only the earliest and latest citation for any given sense displayed; you must click to expand the window and see all the citations. This change reduces scrolling, which is especially welcome on mobile devices with small screens.

These two changes, the tabs and compressed citations, form the bulk of the complaints about the new interface that I’ve heard. But again, these were, I assume, put in place to make it easier for smartphone users. Scrolling through a long entry is relatively easy on a computer with a big screen and mouse but is a hassle on a phone or tablet. But if one likes everything on one page with no clicks to see details, that is available.

You can set up a personal account, which is distinct from your subscription status. You don’t need to have a subscription to have an account, and if you have access through an institutional subscription (e.g., through a library or university), your personal account is unconnected with your institution. In your account, you can set your preferences as to whether you want a tabbed view or everything on one page and whether usage citations are compressed or displayed in full. I’ve set my preferences to a single page with all citations shown, but I may switch to back to tabs and the compressed citations. I’m still trying to figure out which I prefer.

One improvement the OED could make is to allow users to have two sets of preferences, one for computers and one for mobile devices. Currently, you can only optimize the interface for one type of device. But there is a workaround: because the subscriber login is different from the personal account login, you can log into your personal account on your computer and not log in on your phone. This allows you change the display on your computer, leaving the phone at the default, which is optimized for mobile devices.

Another minor improvement is of inestimable help. With the old interface, it was easy to get lost among the senses in a long entry. They were numbered, but only the last character of the numbering was displayed alongside the sense. For instance, if you were looking at sense VII.91.c. for the verb set, only the c. was displayed next to the definition. You had to scroll, sometimes a great distance, to get the full number. With the new interface, the full designation is displayed next to the definition.

Another welcome improvement is that each page contains a “Contribute” link in the header that allows a user to submit comments, additions, or corrections to the entry. Previously, the contact link was buried in the “front-matter” and all but impossible to find.

But not all is perfect. There is an issue with logging in. If you have access via an institutional account, you must log in twice, once via the institution and once for your personal account, in order to use your saved preferences and searches. This would not be so problematic, except the OED automatically logs you out after 45 minutes—regardless of whether or not you are continuously active on the site. The logic behind this is clear; the Oxford UP doesn’t want the access to remain open on public computers. It is likely that the overwhelming number of users log in to look up a single word and remain online for only a few minutes at most. But there are power users, linguistic researchers, who are few in number but make up a significant portion of the total hours logged into the OED. For these, the most loyal and dedicated of the dictionary’s users, the login policy is a major inconvenience. This automatic logout policy needs to be changed. And the fix is easy—upon login require users to specify whether they are working from a personal or shared computer and set the cookie duration appropriately. Banks and financial institutions do this on their sites, and they process much more sensitive information than a dictionary ever would. And what is the harm of having a cookie remain viable for several hours? Some unauthorized user might get to look up an etymology without paying? It is neither a threat to security nor to the OED’s revenue stream.

Another problem is unrelated to the interface and is not new. That is the dictionary does not present a clear record of when and how an entry has been updated. Given that the OED’s entries vary in age, some having not been revised in over a century, and knowing exactly has been changed is often critical to researchers. For instance, the entry for set, v.1 says it was “first published in 1912; not yet revised,” but that it was also “last modified in April 2023.” It further gives the general statement that such modifications short of revision may include: “corrections and revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates; new senses, phrases, and quotations which have been added in subsequent print and online update.” This is too general a description to be of any help. If I am doing etymological work, I really would like to know if the etymology given in the entry was updated a few months ago or if it is over 110 years old. The dictionary needs a wiki-style revision-history tab for each entry.

And there is one other problem. It is minor and probably bothers no one except the ex-marketing person in me; it has to do with the OED’s logo. The old interface had the words Oxford English Dictionary displayed in a distinctive, serif typeface. The typeface was nothing special, but it was distinctive and instantly recognizable. The new interface has replaced this with a boring, utterly unremarkable, sans serif one. It is distinctive only in its amateurish look. The landing page when one is not logged in has a distinctive graphic resembling a starburst, a representation of a spiral data plot. It looks good, but it is not repeated anywhere else. The key to a good logo is that it is appears on everything related to the product. A miniature version of the data starburst should be at the top of every page with OED displayed in the old, instantly recognizable typeface, tying the storied history of the dictionary with advances in data science and visualization.

Still, the faults with the new interface are minor and the changes most welcome. I believe that those who are currently kvetching about the changes will, like me, come around to embrace them as they familiarize themselves with the new interface.

Discuss this post

white nosed

Virginia Woolf, left; Vita Sackville-West, right

6 May 2023

I’ve been working on an article on the perils of relying upon the abbreviated citations found in historical dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary without looking up the originals and viewing them in context, and today I nearly fell victim to the same.

A friend of mine was reading the letters exchanged by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and came across the following in a letter written by Woolf to Sackville-West on 14 October 1927:

Never do I leave you without thinking, its [sic] for the last time. And the truth is, we gain as much as we lose by this. Since I am always certain you'll be off and on with another next Thursday week (you say so yourself, bad creature, at the end of your last letter, which is where the viper carries its sting) since all our intercourse is tinged with this melancholy on my part and desire to be white nosed and so keep you half an instant longer, perhaps, as I say we gain in intensity what we lack in the sober comfortable virtues of a prolonged and safe and respectable and chaste and cold blooded friendship.

She was struck by the unfamiliar white nosed and wondered what it could mean.

I quickly found the book she had been reading, and I saw, but did not register, that the source, Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo’s The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, contains only an extract from the letter.

But intrigued by the question I heedlessly plunged forward looking for white nosed in the usual dictionaries and online repositories of texts. That search turned up nothing except that white nosed is frequently used in the names and descriptions of various animals, which clearly was not the sense Woolf intended.

But turning to Joseph Wright’s 1905 English Dialect Dictionary I thought I’d found the answer. According to Wright, what or wot is a dialectal pronunciation of hot. What being found in the West Country, and in particular Devon, and wot being found more generally across England. And what-nosed is a West Country term literally meaning hot-nosed. Francis Grose’s 1790 Provincial Glossary records the following:

What-Nosed, Hot-nosed; red-nosed, from drinking. West [Country].

Woolf holidayed in Cornwall throughout her life, and I concluded that it was likely she had heard the term and, not having seen it in writing, interpreted it as white-nosed. In context, her desire to drown her melancholy in booze, metaphorically at least, at Sackville-West’s absence made sense. In my thinking, she was deploying a dialectal phrase presumably used by those of low social status to mark a relationship that society would disapprove of. She then contrasted its meaning, to be drunk or hot, with the “sober” and “cold-blooded” virtues that society demanded. She would rather drink deep in the presence of Sackville-West, keeping her “half an instant longer” than parting and settling for the staid, respectable relationship expected of them. This was an example of the skill and care that Woolf took in her writing, even in informal correspondence never intended for publication. Or so I thought.

I posted these initial thoughts to the Wordorigins.org discussion forum and received some pushback to my interpretation. But at the suggestion of Languagehat, and this is where I was saved from publishing it some more permanent form, went looking to see if any Woolf scholars had annotated the letter or if Woolf had used the term in other correspondence.

I found nothing in Woolf’s diaries, and then I turned to the multi-volume edition of her complete letters, edited by Nigel Nicolson. I found that this letter was the only one in which she used white nosed, and I finally started read the complete letter, discovering that the letter starts:

“Well thank God Vita aint coming” I said, putting the telegram down with a snort.

“And why do you say that?” asked Leonard, looking up from his pocket handkerchief. To which I had no answer ready: but the true one was: Because my nose is red.

The poor Wolves have been having colds in the head. Mine I caught in a dentists waiting room: but that’s neither here nor there. The point is the incident symbolizes our friendship. Now think carefully what I mean by that. There’s a dying hue over it: it shows the dolphin colours of decay. Never do I leave you without thinking, its [sic] for the last time….

Clearly, her use of white nosed is in contrast to literally having a red nose from a cold, and it simply means that she wishes she wasn’t ill so that Sackville-West could visit.

I nearly got carried away with what I thought was the use of an obscure, dialectal phrase by a great writer.

Now, that leaves me with what the heck does dolphin colour mean?

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Grose, Francis. A Provincial Glossary. London: S. Hooper, 1790, n.p., s.v. what-nosed. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Woolf, Virginia. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 14 October 1927. In Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo, eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (1984). San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001, 240. Clarivate: Alexander Street.

———. Letter to Vita Sackville-West 14 October 1927 (Letter #1821). In Nigel Nicolson. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1923–28. London: Hogarth Press, 1977, 429–430. Archive.org.

Wright, Joseph. English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 6 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. what-nosed, ppl. adj., wot, adj. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credits: Virginia Woolf, 1902, by George Charles Beresford, Wikimedia Commons; Vita Sackville-West, c.1915, unknown photographer, Wikimedia Commons; both photos are in the public domain.

Bea Wolf (review), by Zach Weinersmith (author) and Boulet (illustrator)

18 April 2023

Weinersmith, Zach (author) and Boulet (illustrator). Bea Wolf. New York: First Second, 2023. 208 pages. US$19.99.

Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters
The parent-unminding kids, the improper,
The politeness-proof,
The unbowed bully-crushers,
The bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers,
Fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.

There was Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween,
Her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor,
Draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth.
Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday.

So begins the mock-epic tale of Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, a delightful adaptation of the Old English epic Beowulf. This latest adaptation of the classic tale will delight children and adults alike.

In it, the titular hero has been transformed into a five-year-old girl and placed into a world of childhood imaginative exaggeration. A world filled with treasure troves of Halloween candy, brave battles with the kids from the next block over, and a fearsome adult-monster, Grindle, who drives King Karl and his gang from their treehouse, Treeheart, with his power to turn children into teenagers. And striding into the scene to rescue Karl and his prepubescent courtiers is Bea Wolf from Heidi’s Hold across the river.

Weinersmith has not only captured the tone and rhythm of the original epic, filling it with alliteration and newly coined kennings for the twenty-first century, but he has also captured the elegiac mood of the Old English poem, for lurking in the background is the knowledge that childhood is fleeting, and imaginative battles and heroic deeds will give way to a life of conference calls, political opinions, and concerns about the stock market.

Accompanying Weinersmith’s imaginative alliterations are Boulet’s wonderful illustrations, not only illustrating the tale but visually echoing the humor and joy of the words. While it’s a perfect book to read aloud to a child, adults will revel in it on their own, as they recall the imaginative fancies of their own childhoods.

While by no means a “faithful translation” (it would be no fun if it were), Bea Wolf does parallel the first third of the Old English epic, the fitts describing the hero’s battle with the monster Grendel. (Yes, the swimming contest and Unferth’s flyting are there too.) And while it does not attempt to parallel the entire poem, it does end with the appearance of Grindle’s mother, leaving the story open for children (and adults) to imagine what great battles and trials will come next.

The book is simply a joy, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

Weinersmith is the author of the internet cartoon Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (which I also highly recommend). Boulet is a French cartoonist and illustrator.

Discuss this post

Who is the bigger liar? George Santos or ChatGPT?

Official portrait of George Santos

22 February 2023

I asked ChatGPT to write my biography. In doing so, it showed itself to be a worthy rival of George Santos.

Things I didn’t know about myself:

• My birth certificate is wrong. Evidently, I was born on 28 November 1955 and not on a different day in 1963.

• I was born in Chelmsford, Essex in the UK, and not in New Jersey, USA as my parents told me. (I don’t remember the event, myself.)

• I attended the University of Sheffield, earning a bachelor’s degree in French and German. Although I do seem to vaguely recall attending Lafayette College in Pennsylvania where I did take a few semesters of German while majoring in Political Science. Don’t remember any French though.

• I have a master’s degree in applied linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. Oddly, I always thought my master’s was in National Security Policy from George Washington University and that I have a PhD in medieval English from the University of Toronto. I do recall visiting Edinburgh, however.

• Evidently, I worked as a lexicographer for both Chambers Harrap and Oxford University Press, and I was a senior editor for the second edition of the OED. Strangely, I always thought I was in the US Army stationed in Germany at the time the OED2 was published.

• I was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2016. I think would remember having met the queen, but maybe not.

Things I did know about myself:

• I do work in the fields of linguistics and lexicography.

• I’m the author of Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends.

• I write the Wordorigins.org blog.

When I typed the request, I thought this would be a neat little experiment in the limits of what ChatGPT knows. I’m essentially a nobody, and I assumed—correctly as it turns out—that there would be little information about me in ChatGPT’s training data. I wanted to see what the AI did with just that kind of limited info. I suspected it would produce a couple of lines, mentioning the book and website, and that’s all. What I got surprised me.

First, it heaped on the praise. Evidently, I’m a “beloved figure in the world of linguistics and lexicography.” While I do like to think that’s the case, even I have to admit that the AI was laying it on thick.

But that’s not the worst of it. The AI spit out 334 words in 6 paragraphs of almost complete fiction. It got only two things right, the book and blog, just what I figured might be somewhere in its training data. What astounded me was the extent to which it fabricated “facts.” (An OBE?! Really?!)

I asked it to regenerate the biography listing its sources, and it cited three, giving URLs for each. The first was a non-existent Wikipedia article. The second was to a UK National Archives page on Brook Walton, an eighteenth-century English baronet and MP. (I had never heard of him, either.) And the third was to a non-existent page on the OED site. Not only did it create “facts,” it created fictional sources for them.

This was truly disturbing and an indicator of how the AI cannot be relied upon, at least not in its present state.

The fabrication of data is not simply a result of its training data being limited. The problem is in the very nature of its programming. When it has little data, it tries to generate plausible information rather than admitting that its knowledge is limited. It is easy to say that the AI will improve with more and better training data—I suspect a ChatGPT biography of Barack Obama, for instance, would be pretty darn accurate. While that’s undoubtedly true, it misses the point. The purpose of the AI is make connections between disparate data; it engages in induction. But an essential requirement of induction is recognizing the limits of one’s data and not to exceed them. ChatGPT is clearly terrible at this. More and better training data will reduce the frequency of this occurring, but it will always happen when its training data does not cover the subject at hand.

In this case, the fabrications are obvious (but perhaps not to a person who stumbles upon Wordorigins.org and wants to see my credentials, which might be the only reason someone, other than me, would want to ask an AI about me), but this is an insidious problem that undoubtedly occurs often but goes unnoticed in output for which the AI has good training data but fills in minor gaps with plausible-sounding fabrications.

Unless the AI can be taught to recognize the difference between induction and a lie, it is pretty much useless as a general tool. And those in Silicon Valley should think long and hard before releasing this or any similar AI into the wild.

Discuss this post

---

Image credit: U.S. House Office of Photography, 2022. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

ADS Word of the Year for 2022

The nominees for ADS Word of the Year

7 January 2023

Yesterday, the American Dialect Society voted on its Word of the Year (WOTY) for the past year. It selected the suffix -ussy, derived from pussy (as in bussy = boy pussy). The ADS uses a loose definition of word in its selection; any lexical item, as well as emojis and other signs, qualify.

The PDF of the ADS press release, listing all the categories, nominees, and vote totals, is here. There are many WOTY processes conducted by many different organizations, but the ADS selection is the original, having been conducted for thirty-three years.

The ADS consists of (mostly) professional linguists and lexicographers, but the selection of WOTY is not an academically rigorous process. Unlike other organizations that have some sort of objective criteria (e.g., Merriam-Webster bases its choice on searches in its online dictionary), the ADS process is informal. The evening before the vote, a small, self-selected group meets and comes up with nominations in the various categories. The categories are mostly consistent from year to year, but special categories can be created if there are a cluster of words on a particular topic. The next night several hundred conference attendees vote on the nominees, and nominations can be made from the floor. The process is raucous and fun, but the results can be skewed in all sorts of ways and should not be taken as serious and deliberative pronouncements.

I’ve participated in the nomination and voting in past years but sat out this year. (If I have another reason to attend the conference, or if it is online as in the past few years, I take part.) My own Wordorigins.org selections for Words of the Year are here.

What follows are my observations on the nominees and choices. Like the WOTY voting itself, my opinions are not serious linguistic conclusions. Pretty much all the WOTY contests, no matter who conducts them, are simply entertainment for the lexically inclined among us.

As for the overall WOTY choice, I’m unfamiliar with -ussy and the process of -ussification, but I don’t frequent TikTok, which evidently is where the term thrives. I would have gone with quiet quitting, which I predict will have more staying power and which is more representative of the mood of the year. Quiet quitting did win the category of Most Useful/Most Likely to Succeed. I concur with that choice, although another nominee, nepo baby, was also a strong contender in my book. -ussy also took the prize in the Most Creative category.

The ADS selection for Political WOTY was Dark Brandon, the supposed sinister, alter ego of Joe Biden, a play on the right-wing catchphrase Let’s Go Brandon. Again, I would have to disagree. Dobbs, a reference to the misogynistic US Supreme Court decision eviscerating women’s rights, received the second-most votes, and I predict it will long outlast Dark Brandon.

The choice for Digital WOTY was the suffix -dle, taken from the name of lexical games patterned after Wordle (e.g., Heardle, Absurdle, and Lewdle). That’s not a bad choice; games like this were quite the fad in 2022, and it is productive and creative. But there were several strong contenders in this category, such as chronically online, touch grass (and antidote for being chronically online), and crypto rug pull. Any of these would have been worthy choices, too. Chief twit was also nominated, and while it certainly held sway over much of the online world this past year, the less said about Elon Musk the better.

It's giving X was the choice for Informal WOTY. It’s another one that I’m unfamiliar with. It comes out of drag culture, which I am not plugged into. But it seems like a worthy choice, especially since the other nominees in this category were lackluster.

ADS’s Euphemism of the Year is special military operation, Putin’s name for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I can’t disagree with this one. You don’t get more euphemistic than this.

The Snowclone/Phrasal Template of the Year went to not X, an ironic expression of mock horror or incredulity. This one is fine, and again I’m not familiar with it. (I’ve probably heard it but just didn’t register it.) I would have gone with X hits different, which garnered the second highest vote total, though.

Finally, Emoji of the Year went to the skull emoji 💀, used to express figurative death (e.g., from laughter or embarrassment). That’s a solid choice.

My biggest takeaway from this year’s choices is that I’m getting too old and too divorced from trends in popular culture. Most of the nominees were completely new to me. 💀

Discuss this post