Oxford Dictionary of English - Editorial Principles and Practices

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.