Editorial work began work on this edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1980 and the CD was published in 1996. The New SOED has its roots in the OED, and shares coverage of words and senses from countries in the English speaking world. The CD contains half a million definitions, 7.5 million words of text and 83,000 quotations. Over 10,000 changes have been made to the text, mainly in response to observations and suggestions made by users; for reasons of space and cost, however, up to 8,000 of these will not be incorporated into the book form of the SOED. British Received pronunciation is used, as is the International Phonetic Alphabet. Three types of search are available: index search, full text and special. An index search covers headwords (words that are at the beginning of an entry in bold type), including acronyms such as “nimby” and “quango”; derivatives; abbreviations (such as “Yorks” or “RIP”); phrases and compound words; uses and references; and other less usual forms of words such as Abrecock = apricot. A full text search covers the etymology, definition and quotation text, and a special search includes anagrams, rhymes and phonetics. The CD has the features of a standard dictionary: pronunciation, parts of speech, homonyms, labels and symbols, variant spellings, inflections, dates, grammatical information, phrases and compounds, notes and derivatives.
The CD arrived without a handy little booklet to tell me how to use the CD and how to get the best use out of the different search modes. There is help available on‐screen which can be printed off and I found this the most efficient way for me to get to grips with the technology and layout. I will not fill this review with information on how to search but I did not think it was particularly easy to use and did have to keep referring to my notes, although that may have had more to do with my lack of familiarity than the actual complexity of the layout. The more I used the CD the more proficient I became. Having never used a dictionary on a CD before I was very impressed. One can tie up key words and authors with quotes and words, always useful for the vague enquiry or crossword clue, as is the anagram listing. I liked the rhyme index, but thought some of the suggested words were not actually very good rhymes.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary 9th edition on CD has sound, and I think that would be a useful additional feature for future editions; but this was my only minor gripe. Otherwise, if one uses a computer/word processing package, this would be a very useful addition to one’s collection of software.
