Wiktionary talk:Quotations/Resources

OED3 vs OED2

Personally I find it no trouble at all to use the OED2 URL system. It pretty much mimics leafing through the pages of a paper dictionary. I had no idea until now that this was even available ..... I remember seeing a few-week period where it seemed that the OED3 had decided to allow people to view URL's but not to search ..... but maybe I was looking at the OED2 and just didnt notice.

Anyway, would it be worth adding a concise summary of the differences between the OED3 and OED2, or do we pretty much already have that? I only ask because if it's really just about search and a slightly larger total size, then I'm surprised that people would be willing to pay for the access to the OED3. Yet, I've talked to people who've seen and used the traditional paper OED where the print was so small that it required a magnifying glass to use .... and was still a very large book, the kind you'd put on a podium and it would take up the whole surface. So, given that, I wonder if the OED2 has "only" 291,601 words because it's significantly abridged, meaning entries are missing for other reasons than just the OED2 being a few decades old. And perhaps quotations have been omitted as well. Not having ever seen the OED3 (unless what I saw during those few weeks was the real thing), I dont have a good way to know what Im missing.

Basically all Im asking is, ... is the open-access OED2 just "old", or is it also significantly abridged? I think we can get by without a search function since we're almost always looking up headwords and not words that may just appear in quotations of some other headword. Thanks, —Soap— 11:48, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

@Soap Alright, I can finally get back to you on this.

1. I compared a few random entries in a physical OED2 to their online versions, and as far as I can tell they are exactly the same.

2. In a random sample of 200 random OED3 entries, 165 of them existed in the OED2, implying that the OED3 has ~20% more entries. Assuming that the editors spend about the same time expanding existing entries as adding new ones, I would guess that the OED3 has ~45% more content overall. This number is constantly growing, and apparently the goal is to get it twice as large as the OED2.

3. Counting the number of words in each dictionary isn't possible without checking every single entry (since a lot of derived terms are listed under the same headword). The OED3 also removed a lot of headwords for alternative forms, rolling them into the main lemma, meaning that it actually has fewer headwords than the OED2 at the moment (288k vs 290k).

4. I think that most of the OED's revenue comes from libraries and universities, not from individuals. I think that far fewer people would buy a subscription if the free OED2 wasn't kept so hidden...

Ioaxxere (talk) 22:51, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Okay thank you. I guess the reason why there's no total word count given for the OED3 is that it's constantly growing, like us, and they would need to update that figure constantly. I saw the part about it being twice as big but wasnt sure if that was a reference to the free OED2 or some no-longer-available unabridged OED2 that was formerly available online. It seems that there are no abridged versions, though, which is great. It's good to hear about the traditional paper version being the same as well. —Soap— 07:53, 15 February 2023 (UTC)