1 00:00:07,410 --> 00:00:12,240 Hello, I'm delighted to be contributing to this centenary celebration. 2 00:00:12,240 --> 00:00:16,110 So I've been asked to talk about women and the Oxford English Dictionary, 3 00:00:16,110 --> 00:00:24,870 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? 4 00:00:24,870 --> 00:00:28,770 That is, of course, in relation to men in the OED. 5 00:00:28,770 --> 00:00:38,490 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. 6 00:00:38,490 --> 00:00:43,230 And here we need to bear in mind the special characteristics of this dictionary. 7 00:00:43,230 --> 00:00:51,600 What made the OED revolutionary when it was first published? It came out in instalments between 1884 and 1928. 8 00:00:51,600 --> 00:00:59,970 And what makes it still unique today is its use of quotations to illustrate every stage of the word's history. 9 00:00:59,970 --> 00:01:04,600 The idea was to chart the progress of every word from cradle to grave. 10 00:01:04,600 --> 00:01:11,010 As the first editor put it in 1860. That is to provide evidence of its first recorded use. 11 00:01:11,010 --> 00:01:16,290 Right through to its last. Now to get hold of these quotations. 12 00:01:16,290 --> 00:01:20,190 The first edition dictionary makers were to use the technical term. 13 00:01:20,190 --> 00:01:27,240 Lexicographers drew up reading lists and word lists and made public appeals for volunteer readers to help them 14 00:01:27,240 --> 00:01:33,660 read as many print attacks as they could lay their hands on from from all carriers of the English language, 15 00:01:33,660 --> 00:01:37,980 from eleven hundreds to from the eleven hundreds to the present day. 16 00:01:37,980 --> 00:01:48,000 Poetry, novels, plays, scientific and technological text of all kinds, works on theology, law, history, geography, etc. cetera. 17 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:54,810 Commerce, the arts, crafts and crafts, professions of all of every imaginable type. 18 00:01:54,810 --> 00:01:57,510 Readers were asked to record quotations, 19 00:01:57,510 --> 00:02:03,270 evidencing the use of the words they thought were interesting or that they knew the lexicographers were after. 20 00:02:03,270 --> 00:02:12,870 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. 21 00:02:12,870 --> 00:02:21,970 Five million quotations were amassed in this way. Altogether, which ranked two million were actually printed in the dictionary itself. 22 00:02:21,970 --> 00:02:26,070 And to make the dictionary to to create the individual entries, 23 00:02:26,070 --> 00:02:31,950 the editors would pull out the bundle of slips for a particular word and pore over them, 24 00:02:31,950 --> 00:02:37,260 studying the different uses and senses of that word over time. 25 00:02:37,260 --> 00:02:44,160 And in this way, they would be able to construct the outline and the content of the eventual printed entry. 26 00:02:44,160 --> 00:02:49,230 So very fundamentally, therefore, these quotations constitution. 27 00:02:49,230 --> 00:02:58,440 The evidentiary basis of the OED. They made it possible for the editors to map out the history of each word and therefore the 28 00:02:58,440 --> 00:03:06,000 English language more generally and to represent that faithfully and each individual entry. 29 00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:10,140 The OED quotations have always been a key element for users of prediction. 30 00:03:10,140 --> 00:03:19,500 To us, it's the quotations that make this amazing multivolume work so fascinating and informative to read. 31 00:03:19,500 --> 00:03:29,050 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. 32 00:03:29,050 --> 00:03:40,040 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, 33 00:03:40,040 --> 00:03:44,650 his so-called scriptorium in the garden of his house in Oxford up the bambury road. 34 00:03:44,650 --> 00:03:55,770 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. 35 00:03:55,770 --> 00:03:59,730 Well, I'm sure you can guess what I'm about to say for the first edition. 36 00:03:59,730 --> 00:04:06,120 The overwhelming majority of quotations came from texts written by men, not by women. 37 00:04:06,120 --> 00:04:12,660 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, 38 00:04:12,660 --> 00:04:17,820 far right, way, way those far outweigh those from female ones. 39 00:04:17,820 --> 00:04:22,140 Now, this disparity only became quantifiable by the early 1990s. 40 00:04:22,140 --> 00:04:31,050 By then, the original Darity had been reissued in the second multi volume edition published in 1989, and the whole thing had been digitised. 41 00:04:31,050 --> 00:04:38,310 Now, this second edition, 1989, made no changes to the original Victorian and Edwardian work, 42 00:04:38,310 --> 00:04:46,680 although it's added a supplement of 20th century work words. And you couldn't search specifically for gender of quotation author. 43 00:04:46,680 --> 00:04:53,730 But it was nevertheless possible to work out which authors and texts to be most intensively quoted in the OED. 44 00:04:53,730 --> 00:05:02,740 And here is a chart showing the top quotation sources for this nineteen eighty nine edition. 45 00:05:02,740 --> 00:05:06,300 As you can see, Shakespeare towers over everyone. 46 00:05:06,300 --> 00:05:18,260 It's over 33000 quotations and then come editions of the Bible, then Walter Scott, various periodicals, Melson, Chaucer, Dryden, Dickens, Tennyson. 47 00:05:18,260 --> 00:05:24,830 And so it goes on with similar names. Well, it's clear that this list is entirely Victorian in character. 48 00:05:24,830 --> 00:05:29,450 And it tells you about Victorian literary and cultural tastes. 49 00:05:29,450 --> 00:05:34,340 Absolutely no female authors were quoted in these sorts of quantities. 50 00:05:34,340 --> 00:05:45,060 Here you can see 12000, 10000, 7000. And in fact, you have to drop down to 3000 before the first female author pops up. 51 00:05:45,060 --> 00:05:50,250 This is George Eliot, and you can see how quickly the numbers drop away after her. 52 00:05:50,250 --> 00:05:54,510 I should just make it clear that there's a difference in scale between this slide. 53 00:05:54,510 --> 00:05:58,860 You're looking at now. And the one we've just seen. So if you look at the numbers, stand the side. 54 00:05:58,860 --> 00:06:07,100 You can see we start at 40 K. And on the next slide, we're starting three case. 55 00:06:07,100 --> 00:06:13,560 Now, of course, in 1989, the OED was badly in need of updating and no one was more aware of this. 56 00:06:13,560 --> 00:06:17,990 The publishers. Oxford University Press and the lexicographers themselves. 57 00:06:17,990 --> 00:06:27,740 So in 2000, an enormously ambitious project was embarked on a complete revision of the creaky old dictionary in its entirety, 58 00:06:27,740 --> 00:06:39,770 with full updating and records of the thousands of new words that have entered the language since that 20th century supplement was published. 59 00:06:39,770 --> 00:06:46,610 So today, in 2020, the lexicographers are about halfway through this massive revision project, 60 00:06:46,610 --> 00:06:52,430 which is now entirely online, and it's hoped that it will be finished in 2040 or so. 61 00:06:52,430 --> 00:06:58,190 Dictionaries take a long time to make. So how are the OED doing with women? 62 00:06:58,190 --> 00:07:03,900 Well, sadly, not that well. You still can't search the Web site by gender or quotation author. 63 00:07:03,900 --> 00:07:13,550 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. 64 00:07:13,550 --> 00:07:24,160 However, the OED online does now have its own list of its top 1000 quotation sources, which you can easily consult. 65 00:07:24,160 --> 00:07:34,110 And when you do, you find that those very same famous male writers continue to head up the list as before Shakespeare comes. 66 00:07:34,110 --> 00:07:41,210 What it's actually now the Times newspaper, The Comstock Shakespeare comes immediately afterwards, followed by Walter Scott, 67 00:07:41,210 --> 00:07:49,650 Chaucer, Milton Dryden, Dickens, etc., interspersed with lots of quotations from many more quotations from periodicals. 68 00:07:49,650 --> 00:07:58,310 But it's all absolutely dominated by male names. The most quoted female writer in today's OED still Georgia. 69 00:07:58,310 --> 00:08:10,790 She comes in at number 92 on this new list, followed by two other female novelists, Frances one 141 and Jane Austen, 240. 70 00:08:10,790 --> 00:08:23,300 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. 71 00:08:23,300 --> 00:08:27,290 So that evidently is a staggeringly low proportion. 72 00:08:27,290 --> 00:08:31,220 And why is this still the case in 2020, after all? 73 00:08:31,220 --> 00:08:38,390 Any period in its history, the English language has been used by both men and women in roughly equal proportions, 74 00:08:38,390 --> 00:08:45,530 presumably so in documenting its history and providing a history of interspeech and thought from its infancy to the present day, 75 00:08:45,530 --> 00:08:52,550 you would expect today's OED to have had at least a shot at evening up the numbers. 76 00:08:52,550 --> 00:08:56,690 Well, there are several answers to this question. Some some more satisfactory. 77 00:08:56,690 --> 00:09:01,340 Some less true. Firstly, source material. 78 00:09:01,340 --> 00:09:09,650 The original OED used only print sources. And today's every day is still limited to textual sources, written sources. 79 00:09:09,650 --> 00:09:15,650 And it's manifestly the case that far fewer women than men were in a position to produce written text before. 80 00:09:15,650 --> 00:09:25,310 Seventeen hundreds. So there there were and there are far fewer female texts out there available for quotation in the OED. 81 00:09:25,310 --> 00:09:30,950 Well, yes, that's true. But by the end of the 18th century, women have become really active and actually culture. 82 00:09:30,950 --> 00:09:34,550 That century saw the rise of the of the female Nobelist, for example. 83 00:09:34,550 --> 00:09:42,140 So that by the end of that century are novels by women were actually denounced as a nuisance. 84 00:09:42,140 --> 00:09:48,020 Certainly from eighteen hundred onwards, there has been plenty of source material produced by both men and women. 85 00:09:48,020 --> 00:09:55,190 And the OED clearly could sanction these sources in suitable quantities if it chose introducing another reason why 86 00:09:55,190 --> 00:10:01,820 there is still so greater disparity in the use of quotations from men and from women reflects the OED own history. 87 00:10:01,820 --> 00:10:10,550 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. 88 00:10:10,550 --> 00:10:17,510 Today's Every Day is still hugely dependent on the quotation collections originally made for the first edition. 89 00:10:17,510 --> 00:10:24,500 Those numbers, I mean, thousands of quotations from Shakespeare et al can't just be thrown away. 90 00:10:24,500 --> 00:10:27,440 That would be a terrible waste of good data. 91 00:10:27,440 --> 00:10:36,200 And these quotations are, in fact, one of the reasons that the OED readers, its users, love the dictionary so much. 92 00:10:36,200 --> 00:10:44,160 However, their continued presence and addiction today means that male authors literary texts are still extremely prominent 93 00:10:44,160 --> 00:10:51,290 to the OED that we consult online and suddenly they dominate many of the entries for core words in English. 94 00:10:51,290 --> 00:10:56,660 The way to deal with this, obviously, would be to set out to gather huge numbers of quotations from female authors, too. 95 00:10:56,660 --> 00:11:05,480 But that has not happened yet. That brings us to a third reason why female author of quotation sources are so underrepresented. 96 00:11:05,480 --> 00:11:15,890 The first edition that. Cockroft and volunteer readers lived at a time when it was culturally accepted that just generally culturally accepted, 97 00:11:15,890 --> 00:11:23,830 that real history was made by great men and the English language was in some way or other, presided over by great writers. 98 00:11:23,830 --> 00:11:32,780 Both past and present, also men. Hence the focus on all those mystery authors, and hence also the neglect of female authors sources. 99 00:11:32,780 --> 00:11:41,330 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. 100 00:11:41,330 --> 00:11:44,660 The OED is a linguistic record, not a literary one. 101 00:11:44,660 --> 00:11:51,140 No linguist today would turn to distri writing as a main source of evidence for contemporary use of language. 102 00:11:51,140 --> 00:11:58,100 We don't any longer take the view that texts written by women are in some way inferior to those written by men. 103 00:11:58,100 --> 00:12:04,550 Certainly not on the existing grounds. So why hasn't today's already done more about the scaping source imbalance? 104 00:12:04,550 --> 00:12:07,940 After 20 years revision, the final answer to that, 105 00:12:07,940 --> 00:12:17,390 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. 106 00:12:17,390 --> 00:12:25,430 For example, getting up to speed on recording world Englishes or making adequate process on the enormous 107 00:12:25,430 --> 00:12:32,070 numbers of new words and usages flooding into the language at a vastly increased rate. 108 00:12:32,070 --> 00:12:40,520 And the second final reason is that across the board, the OED, I think, thinks of itself as gender neutral. 109 00:12:40,520 --> 00:12:44,750 The lexicographers search to what they see as the best possible illustration of 110 00:12:44,750 --> 00:12:50,300 the words use not to even up the representation of male and female authors. 111 00:12:50,300 --> 00:12:55,400 Source material prediction. When I asked the editor of the area, do Michael profit about this recently? 112 00:12:55,400 --> 00:13:01,530 He recognised all his issues and confessed that he was impatient with the progress so far. 113 00:13:01,530 --> 00:13:10,400 And he also said that reading programmes have been significantly broadened so that they now include authors from historically underrepresented groups, 114 00:13:10,400 --> 00:13:20,030 including women and authors of colour. We could say, he said, that while there is no positive discrimination in compiling quotation paragraphs, 115 00:13:20,030 --> 00:13:24,350 there has been affirmative action in broadening the evidence base. 116 00:13:24,350 --> 00:13:29,960 So clearly that is progress. But there is still a gigantic amount of work to be done. 117 00:13:29,960 --> 00:13:37,190 My own personal view is that we live in a culture that is systemically sexist and that without positive discrimination, 118 00:13:37,190 --> 00:13:41,030 the proportions are quotations from female and male authors. 119 00:13:41,030 --> 00:13:47,780 In the OED, I'm not significantly change, not just in the last two minutes. 120 00:13:47,780 --> 00:13:57,200 Let me say that there are evidently many other ways in which women and assumptions about women figure in the OED. 121 00:13:57,200 --> 00:14:06,560 The original OED was full of quotations which portrayed what we would now see as gratuitously sexist views of women nagging over talkative, 122 00:14:06,560 --> 00:14:15,110 emotional, sexually voracious and so on. Oxford lexicographers have been doing a lot of work recently and rooting these out, 123 00:14:15,110 --> 00:14:19,790 not just from the OED, but from the other ox's other dictionaries, too. 124 00:14:19,790 --> 00:14:26,120 There's an enormous range of different dictionaries that Oxford University Press produces. 125 00:14:26,120 --> 00:14:33,410 There was a Twitter explosion in 2016, for example, when it was discovered that in some of those online dictionaries, 126 00:14:33,410 --> 00:14:41,990 I believe the ones for which which provide Google and Apple support Google and Apple to Brout devices. 127 00:14:41,990 --> 00:14:48,380 The word rabid was entirely unnecessarily illustrated with the phrase Raybert feminist, 128 00:14:48,380 --> 00:14:58,280 and that Raoh precipitated searching investigations by the editors of all Oxford dictionaries in the OED. 129 00:14:58,280 --> 00:15:05,000 Many, if not all of the definitions for words for sexually active women, for example, are being rewritten. 130 00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:11,600 That's a particularly sore area. So the word [INAUDIBLE], for example, was updated just last year. 131 00:15:11,600 --> 00:15:17,120 Of course, those offensive words themselves continue to be in the dictionary. 132 00:15:17,120 --> 00:15:26,300 OED doesn't censor the language. Instead, the lexicographers have been adding descriptive labels to entries to indicate that they 133 00:15:26,300 --> 00:15:31,820 are pejorative or offensive in some way and some are unnecessarily biased or slanted. 134 00:15:31,820 --> 00:15:34,820 Quotations have been removed altogether. 135 00:15:34,820 --> 00:15:48,320 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. 136 00:15:48,320 --> 00:15:55,310 Heaven has no rage like love to hate, she turned, nor [INAUDIBLE] a fury like a woman scorned. 137 00:15:55,310 --> 00:16:02,240 That was sixteen ninety seven, followed by Pope men, some to business, some to pleasure take. 138 00:16:02,240 --> 00:16:06,870 But every woman is at heart a rake. These quotation. 139 00:16:06,870 --> 00:16:11,880 Appropriately were removed from the revised entry published in 2011. 140 00:16:11,880 --> 00:16:18,930 That is exactly as it should be. The OED entry for the principle sense of man has only neutral quotations. 141 00:16:18,930 --> 00:16:25,470 And it should go without saying those two entries for man and for one woman should be comparable. 142 00:16:25,470 --> 00:16:33,930 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. 143 00:16:33,930 --> 00:16:41,910 The lexicographers know very well, but it is an important issue and they are striving to do something about it. 144 00:16:41,910 --> 00:16:45,801 Thank you very much.