Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, often abbreviated to SOED, is a scaled-down version of the Oxford English Dictionary. It currently takes up two volumes rather than the twenty needed for the second edition of the OED.

An abridgement of the complete work was contemplated from 1879, when the Oxford University Press took over from the Philological Society on what was then known as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. However, no action was taken until 1902, when the work was begun by William Little , a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He labored until his demise in 1922, at which point he had completed "A" through "T" and "V". The remaining letters were completed by H.W. Fowler ("U", "X", "Y", and "Z") and Mrs. E.A. Coulson ("W") under the direction of Charles Talbut Onions, who succeeded Little as editor.

Onions wrote the SOED was "to present in miniature all the features of the principal work" and to be "a quintessence of those vast materials" in the complete OED.

The first edition was published in February 1933. It was reprinted in March and April of that year and again in 1934. A second edition appeared in 1936, which was reprinted in 1939. A third edition was published in 1944, reprinted in 1947, 1950, 1952, and, with an addendum of new entries, in 1955. The fourth edition was published in 1993 as the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and the fifth appeared in 2002. The third edition was published in America under the name The Oxford Universal Dictionary.

The latest (fifth) edition contains more than half a million definitions, with 83,500 illustrative quotations from 7,000 authors. The publisher's Web site states that all major words in English after 1,700 are included, plus the vocabulary of Shakespeare, Milton, Spencer, and the King James Bible. As a historical dictionary, it includes obsolete words if they are used by major authors and earlier meanings where they explain the development of a word. Headwords are traced back to their earliest usage.

External links

• Description of SOED features
• Sample page from the dictionary