John Simpson, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, has announced his resignation after thirty seven years of service, which he described as a “great honour”. The fellow of Kellogg College will be replaced by Michael Proffitt, the current Editorial Project Director.
Simpson announced last week that he will stand down in October 2013.
Simpson is only the seventh Chief Editor of the dictionary, the first of whom was James Murray, appointed in 1879, and has held his post since 1993. An expert in slang, he has overseen vast changes to the OED. Since his appointment, there have been over 60,000 new additions, consisting both of new words and updated meanings.
Born in Cheltenham in 1953, Simpson was educated at York University and the University of Reading. He joined the OED in 1976, and was Co-Editor of the 1989 Second Edition. He became chief editor in 1993.
In addition to his work for the OED, he is a member of the Philological Society and is a founding member of the European Federation of National Institutions for Language.
Before his retirement, Simpson commissioned the first comprehensive review of the dictionary that will review each word in turn. This began in 2000 and is unlikely to be completed for another ten to fifteen years, with over seventy editors working on the text. Updates are published on the internet every quarter, with a selection of words reviewed each time.
New words that have made it into the dictionary recently include the American political term ‘supermajority’, ‘boccia’ from the Paralympic sport, ‘dance-off’, and ‘podium’ as a verb.
Answering what must be for him, an FAQ (first entry in the OED, 2001), Simpson does not profess to have a favourite word, instead telling Cherwell, “Just now we’ve been working on blue, credit, friend, game, and gang – along with all of their compounds and derivatives – so I’d probably have to say they are my ‘favourite’ words at the moment. There’ll be another batch next month, though”.
Another of Simpson’s achievements was to upload much of the OED online in the past few decades, which he describes as a “step-change” in how it works.
Simpson told Cherwell, “It’s an established presence on the Internet (and people in Britain can access this via their public library system). The OED has broadened its audience while still retaining its scholarly personality; it is now a flexible, dynamic record of our changing language. And I’m proud of all of this.”
Simpson continued, “Unlike other dictionaries which remove archaic and little used words, the OED keeps them all in its full form. This culmination of material means that a print edition now would fill over forty volumes, double that of the last print edition.”
He explained, “The OED doesn’t eject words once they’ve fallen out of use. The dictionary just gets bigger, with all the old words and the new ones combined.”
