John Simpson (lexicographer)
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John (Andrew) Simpson (b. October 13, 1953, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) is a British lexicographer and senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Simpson was co-editor of the second edition, which ran to 20 volumes published in 1989, a combination of the original text with several supplemental volumes that had followed. He also directed the conversion of the OED’s vast printed resources into a streamlined electronic database, bringing the entire second edition on-line in March 2000.
In 1993 Simpson became the chief editor of the OED and is now managing the first complete revision of the dictionary since it was originally published. For this third edition, each word is being examined and revised to improve the accuracy of the definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and historical quotations--a task requiring the efforts of more than 300 scholars, researchers, readers, and consultants. It is projected to cost about $55 million. As Simpson explained to James Eve for the London Times (March 9, 2000), "We think of it as the largest humanities research programme in the world."
Simpson was born on October 13, 1953 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England; son of Robert Morris and Joan Margaret (a teacher; maiden name, Sersale). He received a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of York and a master's degree in medieval studies from the University of Reading. Simpson came to lexicography through studying English literature and philology, especially that of the medieval period. In 1976 he joined the editorial team of the OED which is a division of the Oxford University Press. His first task was working on neologisms (new words) for a supplement to the OED.
When Simpson joined the OED, the process of compiling the dictionary was essentially the same as it had been when it was begun in the 19th century. The bulk of the work consisted of the analysis of millions of index cards, each one containing a quotation as an example of a word's usage. This compilatiom began in 1857, when the British Philological Society started to recruit volunteers to comb through literary works for citations of words to be included in what was then called the "New English Dictionary." In 1879 James A. H. Murray became the editor of the project. He felt that the quotations compiled by the Philological Society were insufficient and unbalanced in their coverage, so he issued a request to the general public, inviting anyone to send in examples of words they encountered in their reading for possible inclusion in the dictionary. Eventually 2,000 readers, primarily from Britain and the United States, sent quotations to Murray, who directed a small team of scholars as they organized the submissions and validated their accuracy. From a total of 5 million submissions, nearly 1.8 million quotations were included in the first edition. Murray named the process the OED "Reading Programme." It has continued relatively unchanged to the present day.
In 1981 Simpson was hired to work on the third supplement, which was published in 1982; the fourth followed in 1986. These added 69,300 entries and 527,000 quotations to the total. Dictionaries, however, need to be updated constantly to remain current, but adding yet another supplement was deemed awkward by the editors because it would require users to consult not only two but three separate alphabetical listings to find a word. The staff decided that the best solution was to merge the supplements with the original edition into a single, integrated compendium. Entries could be consolidated, duplicates deleted, and everything properly ordered and cross-referenced. The editors also realized that the traditional print method of compilation would be too cumbersome when dealing with such a mass of information, and that computers were not simply the best alternative, but perhaps the only means of assuring a future for the dictionary.
Work on the second edition was officially inaugurated in 1984; Edmund Weiner was appointed to be an editor, and Simpson joined him as soon as the supplement was completed, in 1986. The British division of IBM donated a 4341 mainframe computer and other hardware, in addition to committing a small team of computer experts to manage the system. The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada volunteered to design the database. More than 120 keyboarders were hired to input the entire text (350,000,000 characters plus accompanying computer code). The cost of the project reached $13.5 million, but met the five-year deadline.
When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. TIME magazine dubbed it "a scholarly Everest," and Richard Boston, writing for the London Guardian (March 24, 1989), called it "one of the wonders of the world." The dictionary's size alone merits such encomiums: its 20 volumes contain 21,730 pages and weigh a total of 137 pounds. The text is about 60 million words long and includes 290,000 main entries (which is about 40,000 more than the first edition), definitions of about 600,000 word forms, and almost 2.5 million quotations.
As co-editor of the second edition, Simpson had specialized in tracking down new influences on language. He was responsible for vetting the 5,000 new words (and new senses of existing words) that were included in the second edition. The majority of these were derived from developments in science, business, medicine, and North American slang. Examples include yuppification, clone, breakdancing, ghetto blaster, basket case, credit union, AIDS, glasnost, Fortune 500, networking, and nose job. As a result, the language of the second OED, Simpson explained to Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times (March 22, 1989), "is not just the so-called King's English, or Queen's English, but the people's English."
Neologisms have become a personal interest for Simpson, whose mind is always on the job. Philip Howard, who interviewed Simpson for the London Times (March 18, 1989), observed, "In his back pocket he carries a tatty notebook in which he disconcerts you by jotting down instances of new or unusual usage."
Simpson, after becoming chief editor of the OED in 1993, brought the dictionary into the Internet age with its on-line debut in 2000. "I think the OED's first editor, James Murray, would have been quite pleased," Simpson remarked to James Eve. "He would have seen it as the obvious way for the dictionary to go. And in fact, the way that he structured the dictionary with its series of branches, nested senses, meanings and the way that the quotations are arranged converts very easily on to computer."
For the third edition, Simpson is directing the first major revision of the dictionary since its publication in 1933. Each entry is being reviewed in light of improved documentary evidence and new developments in linguistic scholarship. For many words, earlier usages have been discovered. Words whose meaning have shifted since their inclusion, are being brought up to date. Historical notes, updated pronunciations, and lists of variant spellings will also be added. The end result is expected to double the overall length of the text. The style of the dictionary will also be changing slightly. The original text was more literary, with most of the quotations taken from novels, plays, and the like. The new edition, however, will reference all manner of printed resources, such as cookbooks, wills, technical manuals, specialist journals, and rock lyrics.
The pace of inclusion of new words has been increased as well, to the rate of about 4,000 per year. These will be added to the on-line database in quarterly installments. Readers will be treated to such words as "Bollywood," a blend of the names Bombay and Hollywood that refers to India's film industry, and "doh," an exclamation of frustration popularized by the animated television show The Simpsons--although the OED editors were able to trace its use back to the 1950s. Other words derive from technology, such as MP3, network appliance, and weblog, and new business jargon, such as e-tailing (for on-line retailing). Simpson cautions, however, that the heavy influx of new words should not necessarily be construed as evidence that our society is any more linguistically inventive than in the past. "Every generation thinks it lives in the most creative and abundant period," he explained to James Eve, "but the truth is that we probably won't know for another 25 years what language was like in the year 2000." Simpson elaborated, "As far as the OED is concerned, there's certainly a peak [in coinages] in Shakespeare's time and then another at the end of the 19th century, but that may be more representative of the reading of OED contributors than of the actual changes in language itself." There are some societal changes, however, which have had an effect on the current state of the language. "It doesn't take so long for a new word, particularly a slang word, to find its way into print," he told Eve. "Literature has become far more demotic."
The OED’s small army of devoted readers continue to contribute quotations; the department currently receives about 200,000 a year. Nowadays, many of the submissions are made via e-mail. The millions of old word cards the OED has catalogued over the last century and a half, many of them handwritten, are still kept at OED’s offices in Oxford. Simpson told James Eve that he sometimes feels a little nostalgic when he looks through them. "In some ways it's a pity that so much editing and research is now done on computer. You can tell with the old scripts whether they date from the 1930s or the 1950s or whenever, and even to some extent what the writer was feeling that day: if their writing was a little bit hasty, or lazy. Sometimes they wrote little things on the corners. It's quite fascinating."
Simpson, who is considered an expert on English proverbs and slang, has published articles in Medium Aevum, English Today, and other lexicographical and linguistic periodicals. In 1982 he edited the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (now in its third edition), a work characterized as "very jolly" by Philip Howard. He also co-edited the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (1992). Simpson is a member of the English Faculty at Oxford and of the Philological Society. In 1991 he became a Supernumerary Fellow of Kellogg College, at Oxford, along with his colleague Edmund Weiner. In 1999 he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Australian National University, in Canberra, for contributions to lexicography.
Simpson lectures widely on language, lexicography, and the research underway at the OED. In a recent article in the London Times (September 12, 2003), he justified the rarified work of the OED and language considered obsolete by some. "You need to distinguish between the word and the thing. Crompton's mule (the old spinning machine) is obsolete as a thing, but it's very much alive (in history texts) as a word." English words thought dead are often "surviving and frequently used, if you read the right books or talk to the right people." In his spare time Simpson captains a local village cricket team in Oxfordshire. Simpson has two children, Katharine Jane and Eleanor Grace.
