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

16.5 Dictionaries on the Internet 
The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at 
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, but the Internet only 
became a valid storage medium for electronic dictionaries in 1993, when CERN gave 
up the right to charge royalties for World Wide Web documents. Initially publishing 
houses that had invested heavily in dictionary development were unwilling to 
distribute their products in this way, because internet services were usually provided 
free of charge, and little was done to guard against copyright infringement. Carr 
(1997: 210) commented on the irony of the fact that ‘the pioneers in computerised 
editing and CD-ROM books are struggling against their technologies spreading onto 
the Net’. 
Because of this, although by 1998 there were about 400 English dictionaries on the 
World Wide Web (Li 1998: 21), many early online reference works such as the 
Hypertext Webster Interface 
had, according to Carr (1997) ‘an obscure copyright 

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status’, or no named hard-copy source. Others, such as the 1911 edition of Roget’s 
Thesaurus and the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary, were too old to be copyright 
protected. Docherty (2000) describes cases of dictionary plagiarism; a small 
(unnamed) company in Turkey, for example, simply keyed in an English-Turkish 
dictionary published by Langenscheidt and placed it on the internet. The only 
differences between the online version and the original were the typing errors that had 
crept into the plagiarized copy. 
Storrer and Freese (1996) and Carr (1997) 
record the opportunity for ‘one-stop’ 
simultaneous searches of such reference sources, using free internet dictionary search 
engines such as OneLook, founded in 1996, or the Free Online Lexicon and 
Encyclopedia (FILE), available in 1997. Usage of the Free Online Lexicon and 
Encyclopedia between October 1997 and January 1998 was reported on the website of 
its creators, the DICT Development Group (DICT.org, 1999). During this four-month 
period the DICT group’s servers answered approximately 3.1 million requests (over 
1000/hour), but 0.86 million of these were for words that were not found in any of the 
da
tabases―some obviously misspellings, but others searches of common words that 
were simply not defined in the freely available online dictionaries at the time. The 
DICT Development Group also noted that some of its users had found entries from 
the 1913 Webs
ter’s Dictionary to be ‘offensive or politically incorrect’, although the 
group was understandably wary of acting on this information: ‘we do not want to take 
on the task of editing or updating existing databases’. Storrer and Freese (1996) 
commented on the unreliability of public domain on-line dictionaries as compared to 
dictionaries in book form; arguing that nobody took responsibility for the accuracy of 
the information which internet dictionaries provided, and that both the web addresses 
and the page contents were constantly changing.

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Whereas only 188 dictionaries were indexed with OneLook in 1997, by 2005 this 
number had grown to 992 (Li 2005: 16), and included not only the more dubious 
sources, but also a number of highly-regarded publications such as the Cambridge 
International Dictionary of English (indexed in 2002), The American Heritage 
Dictionary of the English Language (indexed in 2003), Encarta World English 
Dictionary (indexed in 2003), Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, tenth edition 
(indexed in 2003), and the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English 
(indexed in 2004). The variable quality of online dictionaries compromised the 
effectiveness of one-
stop searches, however, because ‘all the search data are shown in 
long lists, results from trustworthy sources and downright amateurish concoctions all 
mixed up’ (de Schryver 2003: 157). 
The expansion of internet dictionary resources was partially due to advances in 
technology. Initially, connections were too slow to provide multimedia applications 
such as headword pronunciations, although these were already available for many 
dictionaries on CD-ROM and in handheld devices. Also, in the early days of the 
internet, lines became overloaded if a website proved very popular; an online version 
of the Collins COBUILD Student's Dictionary which was made freely available in 
1998 by the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Hoelter and Wilkens
1998) had to be 
withdrawn in 2004 ‘due to excessive usage’ (Li 2005). The growing use of high speed 
broadband technology in the early 2000s put an end to this sort of problem for many 
users in the developed world. According to Madden (2003: 5) 6% of American home 
internet users had broadband in 2000, rising to 25% in December 2002 and 31% in 
August 2003.
The increased number of good quality dictionaries available on the World Wide 
Web was also partly due to a change in policy on the part of publishers, who started 

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charging for their online products or treated their web dictionaries as marketing tools 
‘to entice the user to buy a book, CD, or electronic access to text’ (Landau 2001: 96). 
In 1999 Oxford University Press launched the Oxford English Dictionary Online, 
available by subscription, and this was followed by Oxford Reference Online: the 
Core Collection in 2002, a subscription service which enabled simultaneous searches 
of one hundred Oxford dictionaries and reference works. On the other hand, although 
MEDAL (2002) was only made accessible online to those who could prove that they 
had bought a copy of the dictionary in book form, on the whole the producers of 
learners’ dictionaries have tended to offer their products for free, but with slightly less 
functionality than on the purchasable CD-ROM. Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a 
‘no frills’ service launched in 1999, aimed to encourage users to upgrade to the 
Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (Harley 2000). (In 2006 
Cambridge added an Online Extra service with audio files, usage notes, study pages 
and more elaborate search facilities for paying subscribers.) Similarly OALD7 is only 
available online without the additional features offered in the Compass CD-ROM 
which is bundled with the print version, and the online LDOCE (2006) provides fewer 
audio pronunciations for headwords and example sentences than LDOCE on CD-
ROM. Online dictionaries also attract users to publisher’s sites where other activities 
and products are on display; these might include news items, ‘word of the day’ or 
‘word of the month’ features, lists of the most frequently looked-up words, teaching 
and learning materials, and, of course, information about how to buy the publisher’s 
products. 
Even if web-based dictionaries lack multimedia files and complex search routes, 
websites can be more easily revised and augmented, and some online dictionaries 
claim to offer wider and more up-to-date coverage than that provided in other 

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dictionary formats. In some cases revision has been facilitated by ‘bottom-up 
lexicography’, a procedure noted by Carr (1997) whereby dictionary sites invite their 
users to participate in the dictionary-making process, either as equal contributors or 
by making suggestions to an editorial board. The ‘Quick Definitions’ section of the 
Onelook 
dictionary site, for example, claims to draw on ‘the hundreds of user-
submitted additions and corrections we've received over the years’. Similarly, the 
DICT Development Group (1999) asked its users to solve the problem of missing or 
objectionable entries in the databases of the Free Online Lexicon and Encyclopedia 
by submitting to the Group their own updated definitions, and the first version of the 
Cambridge International Dictionaries Online (1999) provided users with a 
contribution form to type in any search word not already listed, its meaning, and an 
example sent
ence (Nesi 1999). The same sort of facility was offered by Heinle’s 
Newbury House Online Dictionary, also launched in 1999 (Peterson 1999). The 
Collins Word Exchange (2004) goes one step further, by letting not only the Collins 
editors but also users themselves decide whether or not to publish suggested changes 
in the Collins Living Dictionary (Dean 2005).
Jeremy Butterfield, editor-in-chief of Collins dictionaries, likens the Living 
Dictionary to Wikipedia (Moss 2004). The Living Dictionary is not completely 
collaborative, however, because it employs lexicographers to write definitions, even 
though it allows the general public to decide on some matters of content. Wikipedia, 
founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001, belongs to another tradition of online reference 
work, and grew out of ideas conceived in collaborative web-based communities such 
as Everything
, and Keith Golden’s Wordbot Collaborative Dictionary site, both now 
defunct. In these communities everyone had equal editorial rights, a philosophy 
explained on the Wordbot 
information page: ‘if everyone contributes just a little, then 

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everyone will gain a lot’ (Nesi 2000: 142). Wikipedia and Wiktionary, the companion 
online dictionary, were able to improve on earlier collaborative sites because of the 
invention of wiki (originally Quickweb) 
software, which allows ‘everyday users to 
create and edit any page in a Web site’ (Leuf and Cunningham 2002). The first ever 
wiki site was created in 1995, and the software became available in the early 2000s as 
an open source tool. The first Wiktionary (aiming to describe all the words of all 
languages) was written in English in 2002, and similar Wiktionaries have now been 
created in other languages, along the same lines. 
According to a recent article in The New Yorker (Schiff 2006) Wikipedia is now the 
seventeenth most popular site on the Internet. There has been much debate concerning 
its authority (see, for example, BBC News online for 15 December 2005 and 9 
February 2006) but it is generally conceded that the entries are more up-to-date and 
no more error-prone than those in professionally compiled encyclopedias, albeit not 
so well written. Wiktionary has been less successful in attracting media attention but 
appears to share some of the same strengths and weaknesses as Wikipedia. Writing 
before the first Wiktionary site was underway, Docherty (2000: 68) argued that 
‘uncontrolled authorship can be extremely dangerous if the user is seeking quality and 
reliability’. de Schryver (2003: 160) also dismissed bottom-up collaborative editing as 
‘of little scientific value’ because of its lack of quality control. Admirers of Wikipedia 
and Wiktionary argue that there are a sufficient number of contributors and readers to 
prevent any serious errors from remaining on the sites for long, but Wiktionary entries 
do vary greatly in style and range of content, and although it is useful as a means of 
recording expressions that are too ephemeral or too localized to justify publication in 
a mainstream dictionary, contributions are undated and unsourced, making it difficult 
to track neologisms (and desuetude).

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