What is a word? Are names (of people, places, gods, buildings, etc.) words? In antiquity spelling was not standardised, and gender, suffixation, and inflectional categories could also be variable: what kind of divergences indicate that a variant form found in an ancient source should be considered a distinct word from other related forms? Although such questions cannot be definitively answered, the approach taken in this book is clarified and justified by detailed comparison with other lexica.

Chapter 3 describes the dataset and the methodology for data selection. It also illustrates the corpora of analysis and the approach to morphological productivity used for the quantitative investigation.

Known as ‘the definitive record of the English language‘, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the largest dictionary of English in the world. This chapter traces its creation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day - through the publication of the first edition, supplement volumes, second edition, and the current third edition and OED Online website. The lexicograhic policies and practices of the various editors are also discussed, e.g. from Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall, and James Murray to Henry Bradley, Charles Onions, William Craigie, Robet Burchfield, John Simpson, Ed Weiner, and Michael Proffitt. This chapter also discusses the OED‘s current efforts to move from seeing the dictionary as a discrete text to seeing the dictionary as data which can be used in machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.

In modern lexicography, a core distinction has been made between diachronic and synchronic dictionaries, and English dictionaries are no exception. In fact, English dictionaries are at the centre of this debate, since the Oxford English Dictionary, a landmark scholarly undertaking of the nineteenth century, is arguably the most successful exposition of the diachronic approach to dictionary making. While many other historical language dictionaries have modelled themselves on the OED, the development of a more theoretical basis for synchronic dictionaries was largely led by English language learner dictionaries in the late twentieth century. This chapter seeks to explain the distinctions between diachronic, or historical, dictionaries and their synchronic counterparts; how the distinction arose in English lexicography; what it means for those using or writing dictionaries; and, perhaps, why it’s important. While there is some underlying theoretical basis, the story of dictionaries is overwhelmingly one of practice, the findings are based on illustrative examples from English dictionaries throughout. In conclusion, there is an assessment of how meaningful the distinction continues to be today, and what changes we might expect to see in the future.