The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Present and Future

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has just been published today, which reminded me of this great bit of future-osity in William Gibson's Count Zero:

She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition.

Now that's some good futurizing: a character is propping up a window with the sixth edition of a book that at the time Count Zero was first published, back in 1986, was still in its third edition. Of course now that we do have the sixth edition of the Shorter, can we hope that real cyberspace, autonomous, slightly creepy AIs, and the rise of the corporation-state are not far behind? (Perhaps "hope" is not the word I'm looking for here.) If you want more on the actual release of this edition of the Shorter and much, much less on dictionary cameos in science-fiction novels, then you probably want to check out this post by Ben Zimmer over at the OUP Blog. [Disclaimer: I did not have anything to do with the editing of the Shorter, although I did help a tiny bit in putting together some publicity materials for today's launch.]

Labels: dictionaries_in_fiction

Comments

[Orange]

So, it's got a third as much content as the full OED. What's in the other two thirds that the SOED excludes?

[Ben Zimmer]

Orange: Mostly by cutting down the quotation paragraphs, and also by omitting a lot of pre-1700 words.

[Erin]

Also, they removed every third silent 'e'. You'd be surprised how much space that saves!