Oxford Dictionary of English


The Oxford Dictionary of English is a single-volume English dictionary published by Oxford University Press, first published in 1998 as The New Oxford Dictionary of English. The word "new" was dropped from the title with the Second Edition in 2003. This dictionary is not based on the Oxford English Dictionary and should not be mistaken for a new or updated version of the OED. It is a completely new dictionary which strives to represent as faithfully as possible the current usage of English words.
The Revised Second Edition contains 355,000 words, phrases, and definitions, including biographical references and thousands of encyclopaedic entries. The Third Edition was published in August 2010, with some new words, including "vuvuzela".
It is currently the largest single-volume English-language dictionary published by Oxford University Press.

Editorial principles and practices

The first editor, Judy Pearsall, wrote in the introduction that it is based on a modern understanding of language and is derived from a corpus of contemporary English usage. For example, the editors did not discourage split infinitives, but instead justified their use in some contexts. The first edition was based on bodies of texts such as the British National Corpus and the citation database of the Oxford Reading Programme.
The dictionary "views the language from the perspective that English is a world language". A network of consultants provide extensive coverage of English usage from the United States to the Caribbean and New Zealand.
A more unusual decision was to omit pronunciations of common, everyday words, contrary to the practice of most large dictionaries. The International Phonetic Alphabet is used to present pronunciations, which are based on Received Pronunciation.
The Second Edition added over 3,000 new words, senses and phrases drawn from the Oxford English Corpus.
The New Oxford American Dictionary is the American version of the Oxford Dictionary of English, with substantial editing and uses a diacritical respelling scheme rather than the IPA system.

Publications

''The New Oxford Dictionary of English''

It is a compilation that includes Oxford Dictionaries of English and Concise Oxford Thesaurus.
It is a dictionary app based on contents from Oxford Dictionary of English and New Oxford American Dictionary.