16. Dictionaries in electronic form Hilary Nesi in: Cowie, A. P. (ed) The Oxford History of English Lexicography

 
16.4 Dictionaries on disc 
Teachers have generally preferred the dictionary on disc to the handheld device. 
Handheld devices are designed for private use; they are relatively expensive and are 
generally purchased by individuals rather than the educational institutions. Discs, on 
the other hand, can be manufactured cheaply, and under site licence the dictionary 
content can be installed on many different machines, or distributed via a local area 
network. Moreover the computer screen is large enough to enable several students 
(and their teacher) to view and discuss a dictionary entry together, a feature that 
Guillot and Kenning (1994) appreciated when trialling the Robert Éléctronique in 
class.
In the 1980s the price of hardware fell dramatically and there was an urgent need 
for good-quality educational software to use with microcomputers in schools and 
universities. Educators such as Shaw (1981: 181), for example, lamented the lack of 
computer-
based materials for UK schools, specifying that: ‘programs must be 
portable and well-documented so that they can be readily installed on a variety of 
computers’. Dictionaries on disc met this requirement, and the storage medium 
appealed to publishers because it enabled them to develop, describe and market their 

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electronic dictionaries independently of the electronic goods manufacturers, on the 
basis of the quality of the lexicography rather than any gadgetry.
A few dictionaries were published on 3.5” floppy, such as the Collins English 
Dictionary (1991), the Longman Dictionary of American English for Microsoft 
Windows (1994) and the Electronic Oxford Wordpower Dictionary (1995), but the 
CD-ROM was generally the disc format of choice, because of its capacity (a 12 cm 
CD-ROM could hold about 150,000 print pages). The most important lexicographical 
work to be transferred to disc was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (
 W
EINER
). 
A CD-ROM of the 12-volume 1928 edition appeared in 1988 (Kaye 1989, Milic 
1990) and this was followed by a CD-ROM of the 20-volume second edition (1989) 
in 1992, updated in 1999 and again in 2002. The original transfer process was 
described by Jackson (2002: 57) as a ‘massive undertaking, involving collaboration 
between the International Computaprint Corporation in Fort Washington, 
Pennsylvania, the University of Waterloo in Canada, IBM United Kingdom Ltd and 
Oxford University Press’. The typeface was of too uneven quality to be scanned, so 
that more than 120 people were employed to key in text, with 50 more to check their 
work.
Search routes through the first OED on CD-ROM were facilitated by recent 
developments in hypertext applications (Stubbs 1985, Raymond and Tompa 1988). 
Dictionaries have an inherent hypertextual structure and they are intended to be read 
non-
sequentially, following routes dependent on the user’s consultation needs, so 
hypertext proved to be an ideal way to navigate lexicographical data. It permitted the 
user to jump from one part of a publication to another, and (in later publications) to 
jump between reference works, or between a dictionary and whatever online text(s) 
the user was reading or writing at the time. Having been manually compiled, however, 

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the OED posed some hypertext linking problems. The volumes had originally been 
created in alphabetical order, and there were more cross-references in the later 
volumes than 
in the early volumes, because compilers ‘were more likely to cross-
reference existing entries than the still uncompiled ones’ (Raymond and Tompa 1988: 
875). It turned out to be much easier to create interfaces for electronic versions of 
more recent print-based dictionaries, thanks to the computer-assisted compilation 
methods that had been developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Many more monolingual native-speaker English language dictionaries appeared on 
CD-ROM in the 1990s, including The American Heritage Dictionary of the English 
Language, third edition (1992),