Editorial Principles and Practices
The first editor, Judy Pearsal, wrote in the introduction that it is based on a modern understanding of language and is derived from a corpus of contemporary English usage. For example, the editors did not discourage split infinitives, but instead justified their use in some contexts. The dictionary is based on bodies of texts such as the British National Corpus and the citation database of the Oxford Reading Programme.
The dictionary "views the language from the perspective that English is a world language". A network of consultants provide extensive coverage of English usage from the US to the Caribbean and New Zealand.
A more unusual decision was to omit pronunciations of common, everyday words, contrary to the practice of most large dictionaries. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used to present pronunciations which are in turn based on the Received Pronunciation.
The New Oxford American Dictionary is the American version of the Oxford Dictionary of English, with substantial editing and uses a diacritical respelling scheme rather than the IPA system.
Read more about this topic: Oxford Dictionary Of English
Famous quotes containing the words editorial, principles and/or practices:
“I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“His principles are like the bristles of a domesticated pig, they don’t pierce through the pork.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)