Hello, I'm delighted to be contributing to this centenary celebration.
So I've been asked to talk about women and the Oxford English Dictionary,
and I want to begin by thinking about what that means and what what in what way might we expect women to be in the OED?
That is, of course, in relation to men in the OED.
To answer that question, we'll look at how the OED was actually made, in particular the role played by quotation evidence and constructed prediction.
And here we need to bear in mind the special characteristics of this dictionary.
What made the OED revolutionary when it was first published? It came out in instalments between 1884 and 1928.
And what makes it still unique today is its use of quotations to illustrate every stage of the word's history.
The idea was to chart the progress of every word from cradle to grave.
As the first editor put it in 1860. That is to provide evidence of its first recorded use.
Right through to its last. Now to get hold of these quotations.
The first edition dictionary makers were to use the technical term.
Lexicographers drew up reading lists and word lists and made public appeals for volunteer readers to help them
read as many print attacks as they could lay their hands on from from all carriers of the English language,
from eleven hundreds to from the eleven hundreds to the present day.
Poetry, novels, plays, scientific and technological text of all kinds, works on theology, law, history, geography, etc. cetera.
Commerce, the arts, crafts and crafts, professions of all of every imaginable type.
Readers were asked to record quotations,
evidencing the use of the words they thought were interesting or that they knew the lexicographers were after.
And they wrote these quotations stone on slips of paper. About six by four inches and sent them in by post to the dictionary in Oxford.
Five million quotations were amassed in this way. Altogether, which ranked two million were actually printed in the dictionary itself.
And to make the dictionary to to create the individual entries,
the editors would pull out the bundle of slips for a particular word and pore over them,
studying the different uses and senses of that word over time.
And in this way, they would be able to construct the outline and the content of the eventual printed entry.
So very fundamentally, therefore, these quotations constitution.
The evidentiary basis of the OED. They made it possible for the editors to map out the history of each word and therefore the
English language more generally and to represent that faithfully and each individual entry.
The OED quotations have always been a key element for users of prediction.
To us, it's the quotations that make this amazing multivolume work so fascinating and informative to read.
As one early reviewer put it, the OED was in effect a history of English speech and thought from its infancy to the present day.
And I've got up on the screen for you to look at a famous photo of James Murray, the chief editor of the first edition of the OED in his his workroom,
his so-called scriptorium in the garden of his house in Oxford up the bambury road.
And you can see behind him, the walls are lined with pigeonholes, which just is stuffed with all these quotation slips filed in alphabetical order.
Well, I'm sure you can guess what I'm about to say for the first edition.
The overwhelming majority of quotations came from texts written by men, not by women.
And in fact, you only have to look at an average page of any volume of the OED to see that quotations from male authors,
far right, way, way those far outweigh those from female ones.
Now, this disparity only became quantifiable by the early 1990s.
By then, the original Darity had been reissued in the second multi volume edition published in 1989, and the whole thing had been digitised.
Now, this second edition, 1989, made no changes to the original Victorian and Edwardian work,
although it's added a supplement of 20th century work words. And you couldn't search specifically for gender of quotation author.
But it was nevertheless possible to work out which authors and texts to be most intensively quoted in the OED.
And here is a chart showing the top quotation sources for this nineteen eighty nine edition.
As you can see, Shakespeare towers over everyone.
It's over 33000 quotations and then come editions of the Bible, then Walter Scott, various periodicals, Melson, Chaucer, Dryden, Dickens, Tennyson.
And so it goes on with similar names. Well, it's clear that this list is entirely Victorian in character.
And it tells you about Victorian literary and cultural tastes.
Absolutely no female authors were quoted in these sorts of quantities.
Here you can see 12000, 10000, 7000. And in fact, you have to drop down to 3000 before the first female author pops up.
This is George Eliot, and you can see how quickly the numbers drop away after her.
I should just make it clear that there's a difference in scale between this slide.
You're looking at now. And the one we've just seen. So if you look at the numbers, stand the side.
You can see we start at 40 K. And on the next slide, we're starting three case.
Now, of course, in 1989, the OED was badly in need of updating and no one was more aware of this.
The publishers. Oxford University Press and the lexicographers themselves.
So in 2000, an enormously ambitious project was embarked on a complete revision of the creaky old dictionary in its entirety,
with full updating and records of the thousands of new words that have entered the language since that 20th century supplement was published.
So today, in 2020, the lexicographers are about halfway through this massive revision project,
which is now entirely online, and it's hoped that it will be finished in 2040 or so.
Dictionaries take a long time to make. So how are the OED doing with women?
Well, sadly, not that well. You still can't search the Web site by gender or quotation author.
So you can't actually get at the primary data and see which female authors have been quoted from which various periods of the language.
However, the OED online does now have its own list of its top 1000 quotation sources, which you can easily consult.
And when you do, you find that those very same famous male writers continue to head up the list as before Shakespeare comes.
What it's actually now the Times newspaper, The Comstock Shakespeare comes immediately afterwards, followed by Walter Scott,
Chaucer, Milton Dryden, Dickens, etc., interspersed with lots of quotations from many more quotations from periodicals.
But it's all absolutely dominated by male names. The most quoted female writer in today's OED still Georgia.
She comes in at number 92 on this new list, followed by two other female novelists, Frances one 141 and Jane Austen, 240.
But altogether, though, out of this list of 1000 most quoted sources in today's OED, only 28 are women, 28 out of a thousand.
So that evidently is a staggeringly low proportion.
And why is this still the case in 2020, after all?
Any period in its history, the English language has been used by both men and women in roughly equal proportions,
presumably so in documenting its history and providing a history of interspeech and thought from its infancy to the present day,
you would expect today's OED to have had at least a shot at evening up the numbers.
Well, there are several answers to this question. Some some more satisfactory.
Some less true. Firstly, source material.
The original OED used only print sources. And today's every day is still limited to textual sources, written sources.
And it's manifestly the case that far fewer women than men were in a position to produce written text before.
Seventeen hundreds. So there there were and there are far fewer female texts out there available for quotation in the OED.
Well, yes, that's true. But by the end of the 18th century, women have become really active and actually culture.
That century saw the rise of the of the female Nobelist, for example.
So that by the end of that century are novels by women were actually denounced as a nuisance.
Certainly from eighteen hundred onwards, there has been plenty of source material produced by both men and women.
And the OED clearly could sanction these sources in suitable quantities if it chose introducing another reason why
there is still so greater disparity in the use of quotations from men and from women reflects the OED own history.
Although this full scale revision of the dictionary has been going on for 20 years now and vast quantities of new material has been added.
Today's Every Day is still hugely dependent on the quotation collections originally made for the first edition.
Those numbers, I mean, thousands of quotations from Shakespeare et al can't just be thrown away.
That would be a terrible waste of good data.
And these quotations are, in fact, one of the reasons that the OED readers, its users, love the dictionary so much.
However, their continued presence and addiction today means that male authors literary texts are still extremely prominent
to the OED that we consult online and suddenly they dominate many of the entries for core words in English.
The way to deal with this, obviously, would be to set out to gather huge numbers of quotations from female authors, too.
But that has not happened yet. That brings us to a third reason why female author of quotation sources are so underrepresented.
The first edition that. Cockroft and volunteer readers lived at a time when it was culturally accepted that just generally culturally accepted,
that real history was made by great men and the English language was in some way or other, presided over by great writers.
Both past and present, also men. Hence the focus on all those mystery authors, and hence also the neglect of female authors sources.
Even when they were widely available. But while this answer explains the makeup of the first edition, it doesn't really pass muster for today's OED.
The OED is a linguistic record, not a literary one.
No linguist today would turn to distri writing as a main source of evidence for contemporary use of language.
We don't any longer take the view that texts written by women are in some way inferior to those written by men.
Certainly not on the existing grounds. So why hasn't today's already done more about the scaping source imbalance?
After 20 years revision, the final answer to that,
I think is on which to answer is really one of them is that it hasn't been as high up the list of priorities as correcting other imbalances.
For example, getting up to speed on recording world Englishes or making adequate process on the enormous
numbers of new words and usages flooding into the language at a vastly increased rate.
And the second final reason is that across the board, the OED, I think, thinks of itself as gender neutral.
The lexicographers search to what they see as the best possible illustration of
the words use not to even up the representation of male and female authors.
Source material prediction. When I asked the editor of the area, do Michael profit about this recently?
He recognised all his issues and confessed that he was impatient with the progress so far.
And he also said that reading programmes have been significantly broadened so that they now include authors from historically underrepresented groups,
including women and authors of colour. We could say, he said, that while there is no positive discrimination in compiling quotation paragraphs,
there has been affirmative action in broadening the evidence base.
So clearly that is progress. But there is still a gigantic amount of work to be done.
My own personal view is that we live in a culture that is systemically sexist and that without positive discrimination,
the proportions are quotations from female and male authors.
In the OED, I'm not significantly change, not just in the last two minutes.
Let me say that there are evidently many other ways in which women and assumptions about women figure in the OED.
The original OED was full of quotations which portrayed what we would now see as gratuitously sexist views of women nagging over talkative,
emotional, sexually voracious and so on. Oxford lexicographers have been doing a lot of work recently and rooting these out,
not just from the OED, but from the other ox's other dictionaries, too.
There's an enormous range of different dictionaries that Oxford University Press produces.
There was a Twitter explosion in 2016, for example, when it was discovered that in some of those online dictionaries,
I believe the ones for which which provide Google and Apple support Google and Apple to Brout devices.
The word rabid was entirely unnecessarily illustrated with the phrase Raybert feminist,
and that Raoh precipitated searching investigations by the editors of all Oxford dictionaries in the OED.
Many, if not all of the definitions for words for sexually active women, for example, are being rewritten.
That's a particularly sore area. So the word [INAUDIBLE], for example, was updated just last year.
Of course, those offensive words themselves continue to be in the dictionary.
OED doesn't censor the language. Instead, the lexicographers have been adding descriptive labels to entries to indicate that they
are pejorative or offensive in some way and some are unnecessarily biased or slanted.
Quotations have been removed altogether.
Up to 2011 under LeBon, the OED entry for the word woman used in a neutral sense, had included a quotation from Congreve as an example of typical use.
Heaven has no rage like love to hate, she turned, nor [INAUDIBLE] a fury like a woman scorned.
That was sixteen ninety seven, followed by Pope men, some to business, some to pleasure take.
But every woman is at heart a rake. These quotation.
Appropriately were removed from the revised entry published in 2011.
That is exactly as it should be. The OED entry for the principle sense of man has only neutral quotations.
And it should go without saying those two entries for man and for one woman should be comparable.
But there is still quite a long way to go here. There is no doubt then that the representation of women in the OED is improving.
The lexicographers know very well, but it is an important issue and they are striving to do something about it.
Thank you very much.