The OED on CD-ROM: the past five years, and the next steps

It has been five years since the electronic edition of the 2nd edition of the OED was published in June 1992, and this seems a good time to take a quick look back on how it has fared, and to report briefly on what happens next.

The OED CD came out to tremendous media acclaim - providing the kind of quotations we still use in all our publicity - and has done extremely well right from the start. The obvious market is in academic institutions, in the UK and overseas, and it has come well up to expectations here. But a very different market has since emerged, and particularly since the decision was taken early in 1996 to cut the price by 50%. The OED is now a dictionary which people can buy for themselves - for freelance translators, writers, journalists, and crossword addicts.

The range of uses to which it is put has changed, too. We still get many queries along the lines of 'What is the best way to identify words from Old Norse?', but these are interspersed with the likes of 'How do I find the word meaning a newly-qualified taxi-driver?'

The compact disc edition has not been trouble-free. In the first couple of years or so, there were many calls from users grappling with PCs which only barely met the specification to run it, and the first release of the installation software was tricky. Originally it was not intended that users should print direct from the application, and there were restrictions on output because of font licensing. Many changes have happened to the retrieval software, although the CD itself remains the same, and for Windows we are now at Version 1.13.

New links have been devised as new versions of Word for Windows have appeared; Windows '95 demanded a fix; AND Software, the developers, are now working on compatibility with Microsoft Office '97. But in general, and considering the complexity of the data, the problems have been minimal in comparison with what can be done with the OED on a compact disc.

The CD is showing its age in terms of screen design, and many users now comment that some standard features of Windows and Mac software are missing from their OED. Many OED users also use our later dictionaries such as the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and the Concise Oxford Dictionary on CD-ROM, and very much appreciate some features which these dictionaries contain (such as immediate pop-up links to Abbreviations, and more standard interfaces - not to mention the extra benefits of searching by label in the NSOED, and of spoken headwords in the COD).

While the lack of these in the older OED has never seriously affected the usefulness of the electronic edition, people are asking now about upgrades and wondering when they will see the kind of design and function features they know of in other electronic titles. We are therefore happy to be able to announce that there will be a completely new edition of the OED on CD-ROM, due out next year.