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

Webster’s New World College Dictionary, third 
edition (1994), The Chambers Dictionary (1994), 
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 
second edition (1996), Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition (1996), 
Infopedia UK (1996) and COD (ninth
edition 1997; tenth edition 1999).
Jackson (2002: 70) describes the range of search functions available for these 
dictionaries, from the simplest which simply linked the search word and the relevant 
entry (as in Infopedia UK), to the more sophisticated which offered the option to 
search the full dictionary text, and employ wildcards and Boolean operators (as in 
COD9 and 10). As with many second generation handheld electronic dictionaries, 
Infopedia UK offered limited search facilities but a wide range of sources, being a 
compendium of the Longman Dictionary of the English Language, the Bloomsbury 
Thesaurus, and various encyclopaedic reference works, together with photographs, 
audio clips, video sequences and maps. At the other end of the scale COD9 and 10 
contained only the text of COD, but at least offered complex full-text searches. 
Jackson notes however, that COD9 was a more sophisticated tool for lexical research 
than the COD10, produced two years later. This was because the earlier version 

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included ‘filters’ to limit the full text search to headwords, definitions, idioms, phrasal 
verbs or etymology, thus making it possible, for example, to search for groups of 
words such as all the phrasal verbs formed with up as their adverbial particle (Jackson 
2002: 71).
COD10 
introduced a ‘quick search’ facility which enabled users to call up 
dictionary entries by double clicking on words in an on-screen text. This idea was 
developed further by Oxford University Press and other dictionary publishers through 
the adoption of iFinger, a search and presentation engine. Once the dictionary was 
installed on the user’s hard drive the iFinger software enabled a pop-up window to 
appear whenever a word was typed into the input field box, or whenever the cursor 
was moved over the word on a web page or in any Windows-based program. iFinger 
technology became a feature of many dictionaries on CD-ROM, including the PONS 
Lexiface bilingual dictionary series, the Prisma Digitaal Woordenboek
 bilingual 
dictionary series, the Merriam-Webster series and the Pop-up New Oxford Dictionary 
of English on CD-ROM (2001). It has also functioned in multiple title packages such 
as the Oxford Pop-up Reference Shelf on CD-ROM (2000) and the Oxford World 
English Dictionary Shelf on CD-ROM (2002). With iFinger searches can take place 
across multiple reference works at once, with the results presented in a single 
window. Another lexicographical tool, BOOKcase, gave access to external programs, 
such as internet search engines, and also integrated separate but complementary 
electronic reference works, allowing several to be open at the same time. BOOKcase 
has been used to provide joint access to a number of dictionaries, including those in 
the Routledge bilingual Technical Dictionary series (Quervel 1998; Croese 1998), the 
Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2000) and the 
Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary on CD-ROM (2001) (Tsai 2002), and also the 

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Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) on CD-ROM (2000) and the Oxford 
Guide to British and American Culture on CD-ROM (1999) (Rizo-Rodriguez 2004: 
40). 
The first English learners’ dictionary on CD-ROM was the Longman Interactive 
English Dictionary (LIED) in 1993. This was followed by Collins COBUILD on CD-
ROM in 1995 and the Longman Interactive American Dictionary (LIAD) in 1997. All 
three were compilations of earlier print-based sources. LIED was made up of four 
volumes: the Longman Dictionary of Language and Culture, a dictionary of common 
errors, a pronunciation dictionary and an English grammar. The COBUILD and LIAD 
CD-ROMs each contained three volumes: a dictionary, an English grammar, and a 
usage guide (in the case of COBUILD) or a dictionary of common errors (in the case 
of LIAD). LIED and LIAD also provided audio files and a series of mini dramas on 
video, and Collins COBUILD on CD-ROM included a previously unpublished Word 
Bank of five million words. In each case the component volumes were cross-
referenced to each other, and when consulting one component the user might be 
directed to additional information about meaning, pronunciation, grammar or use to 
be found in the companion sources. Cross-referencing was often problematic, 
however, because the printed books, which had originally been created independently 
of one another, had different numbering systems, different cross-referencing systems, 
and different levels of coverage of the same words (Nesi 1996). As Seedhouse (1997) 
comments of Collins Cobuild on CD-ROM
, ‘the rationale ... seems to have been 
roughly “Stick all the products we already have on a cd-rom and let’s hope somebody 
can find a use for it”.’
These first monolingual learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM were very 
experimental; the innovations were exciting but the defects were many, especially as 

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far as cross-referencing was concerned. Some publishers opted for a simpler format 
after this disappointing phase: Collins COBUILD edict (1998) lacked the earlier 
grammar and usage components and did not include the Word Bank, and the first 
learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM from Oxford University Press, the Oxford 
Interactive Wordpower Dictionary (1998) and OALD5 and 6 (1995 and 2000), were 
single title publications. Newcomers to the market, the Cambridge International 
Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2000) and the Macmillan English Dictionary 
(MEDAL) on CD-ROM (2002), were also based on single print-based sources. 
Longman continued with multi-title products, however, producing an updated version 
of LIED in 2000 and combining LDOCE with the Longman Language Activator in 
2003. Collins COBUILD III on CD-ROM reintroduced the earlier COBUILD 
characteristics in 2001, adding a concordancer to enable searches of the Word Bank. 
Two recent products, the Phrasebuilder Genie (2004) and the Oxford Compass (2005) 
combine OALD material with other titles: the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for 
Students of English in the Phrasebuilder Genie and the Oxford Guide to British and 
American Culture in the Oxford Compass.
As noted by Jackson (200
2: 141), monolingual learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM 
have tended to exploit the potential of the electronic medium more extensively than 
native speaker dictionaries. Rizo-Rodriguez (2004: 39) lists some of their 
characteristic features: 
 Advanced search modes with wildcards, Boolean operators, filters, and in 
some cases a thesaurus function (see, for example, the Cambridge 
International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2000) as described by Tsai 
2002) 

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 Internal links to word processing applications and other computer software, 
allowing users to copy text from dictionary to document 
 Access to a pop-up dictionary window from the text, and, more recently, 
‘intelligent look-up’, whereby the software selects an appropriate dictionary 
entry on the basis of linguistic clues (see, for example, the Oxford Advanced 
Genie (2002), and the Oxford Phrasebuilder Genie (2003) as described by 
Tsai (2004)) 
 The possibility of cutting, pasting and printing dictionary material
 Instant look-up of words in dictionary definitions and examples, by clicking 
on them on the screen
 Dictionary annotation features (see, for example, MEDAL on CD-ROM, 2002)
 Audio recordings of headwords, and in some cases the opportunity for users to 
record and replay their own pronunciations 
 A ‘history’ function, that enables users to review the results of previous 
searches 
 ‘Banks’ of text (as in the COBUILD CD-ROMs) or of phrases and examples 
(as in LDOCE4) 
 Options to show or hide entry features, so that more or less information is 
revealed. 
 Pedagogical extras such as games, exercises, illustrations and video 
Perhaps the most interesting of these developments is the provision of new search 
modes, enabling many of the ‘fuzzy matching’ search types envisioned by Dodd 
(1989: 89). Dodd had foreseen that electronic dictionaries of the future might allow 
users to find a word which: 

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‘sounds like A’ 
‘rhymes with B’ 
‘is spelt like C’ 
‘has an etymology of D’ 
‘dates from year/century E’ 
‘is used in the style of F’ 
‘is used in technical field G’ 
‘is an antonym of H’ 
‘is a synonym of I’ 
‘is a hyponym of J’ 
‘is a superordinate of K’ 
‘includes the word(s) L in its definition’ 
‘is of grammatical class M’ 
and 
‘has syntactic valency or pattern N’.
Phonetic transcription to search for headwords (Dodd’s search route A) first became 
possible with the ‘Sound Search’ facility in the MEDAL CD-ROM (2002) and 
Macmillan Essential Dictionary for Learners of English CD-ROM (2003), but even 
the earliest monolingual learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM provided wildcards to 
help with search routes A, B and C. The first LIED and COBUILD CD-ROMs also 
provided lists of homophone pairs, and for some searches in LIED 
a ‘Spelling Note’ 
box appeared, suggesting alternative initial letters for search words. Etymological 
information (Dodd’s search route D) was first included in the LDOCE CD-ROM 

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(2003), followed by the Oxford Compass (2005), but a route that had some of the 
characteristics of Dodd’s ‘dates from year/century E’ was available to users of the 
first LIED and LIAD through date searches for people listed in the encyclopaedic 
dictionaries of Language and Culture. More elaborate searches for style, register, 
antonyms, synonyms, hyponyms, superordinates, word classes and valency patterns 
(Dodd's routes F, G, H, I, J, K, M and N) could be conducted in many of the early 
CD-ROM dictionaries by means of filtered searches: Geography, Subject Specialism, 
Register, Word Class and Word Class Subcategory in the OALD CD-ROM (1997), for 
example, and Headword, Inflections, Meaning, Examples, Grammar, Synonyms, 
Antonyms, Superordinates, Phrases and Derived Words in Collins COBUILD on CD-
ROM 
(1995). Search route L (‘includes the word(s) L in its definition’) could also be 
achieved in many dictionaries by conducting a full text search. 
These features helped to recommend CD-ROMs for educational and library use 
before the advent of the internet. The market for dictionaries on CD-ROM for 
personal use, however, was always an uncertain one. Harley (2000: 85) noted that 
sales of electronic dictionaries were ‘rather modest’, and reported that CD-ROM 
dictionaries had ‘hardly taken off in a big way’. The new technology also turned out 
to be expensive in terms of customer support; according to Gillen (1995) additional 
technical advice of some sort was requested for 10%-30% of all CD-ROM products 
sold. The practice of bundling a CD-ROM with another related product was one way 
of ensuring distribution. An electronic reference work was sometimes included as an 
apparently free addition to the print version, as was the case with the 1993 edition of 
the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, noted by Wooldridge (2004). 
Alternatively it could be bundled with other software or computer hardware, like 
Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM in the 1990s, and the bilingual 

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English-Chinese dictionary Kingsoft Powerword, published by Peking University 
Press (also known as the Jin Shan Ci Ba). Although Kingsoft Powerword is full of 
errors, due largely to the inconsistent quality of its source dictionaries (Zhang 2004), 
it is probably the most widely used CD-ROM dictionary in the world (eight million 
copies were distributed between 1997 and 2002, according to the Kingsoft website 
(2006)). 
The practice of bundling continues, and a CD-ROM accompanies many new 
dictionary editions. Improved technology, however, has also made it possible to 
download dictionary material directly from the internet to a PC or PDA, without the 
need to purchase a CD-ROM.