Introducing the Oxford English Dictionary
OED online
The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.
The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
How to use Simple search and Advanced Search
For more information, see the Short introduction (
PPT, 7.37 MB).
Hyphenation in English
Hyphenation in English is not fixed, but highly variable. It is not easy for us to keep up with shifts in prevalent usage, even in frequently updated books such as the 'Concise Oxford Dictionary'; to do so in a large historical reference work such as the complete 'Oxford English Dictionary' would unfortunately be quite impossible. For everyday guidance, a dictionary of current English such as the 'Concise Oxford' might be of more immediate use, since its editors aim to list the most common form in contemporary British English. In most cases, if the question involves an ordinary compound noun, the answer is that a hyphen may or may not be used, according to personal whim, local convention, or editorial consistency.
From the introduction to the current 'Concise Oxford Dictionary':
- Noun compounds: there are no hard-and-fast rules to determine the use of one-word, two-word, or hyphenated forms (except when used to show grammatical function: see below)... The evidence of modern English indicates a tendency towards avoiding hyphenation in general, showing a preference for 'airstream' rather than 'air-stream' and for 'air raid' rather than 'air-raid'. There is an additional tendency for the form to be one word in US English and two words in British English.
- Grammatical function: ... When a noun compound made up of two separate words (e.g. 'credit card') is placed before another noun and used to modify it, the general rule is that the noun compound becomes hyphenated, e.g. 'I used my credit card' but 'credit-card debt'. A similar alternation is found in compound adjectives... 'he is not well known' but 'a well-known painter'. A general rule governing verb compounds means that, when a noun compound is two words (e.g. 'beta test'), any verb derived from it is normally hyphenated ('to beta-test').
Some other specific standardized uses of hyphens are discussed on the Ask Oxford website at
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/hyphen
Forms which are usually hyphenated include compound nouns and adjectives formed with verbal participles ('weight-carrying', 'shark-fishing') unless they become so fixed as to become firmly established as single words ('weightlifting'). One-word forms are avoided if visual confusion might result ('hang-gliding', or possibly 'hang gliding', but never 'hanggliding').