Words With Friends – Reaching for a dictionary that isn’t there

Reaching for cyberspace….

Like everyone else, apparently, I have moved from wasting hours on Freecell to wasting hours on Words With Friends.

This is considered a more ‘social’ game, (as you play it with other people).

While I try assiduously to avoid going to Scrabblecheat.com (there’s a website for everything. Is there a website called taxcheat.com?), yesterday, I did reach for the dictionary.

I reached for it, and I was astonished to realize that I don’t own one.

That’s pretty funny, because I have like 1,000 books. Sometimes I think I am singlehandedly supporting Amazon.com, but when I went to order a new copy of the world’s best dictionary, The Oxford English Dictionary, I was astonished to see that it is no longer being published.. at least on paper.

Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, said in an interview with The New York Times last year, that the market for print dictionaries “is just disappearing.”

“It is falling away by tens of percent a year.” Asked if the third edition of the O.E.D. would appear in print, Mr. Portwood replied, “I don’t think so.”

That, in itself is pretty astonishing, but that raises the question of the short-lived nature of technology.

While packing up some old books (no dictionaries amongst them) I came across four hi-8 tapes which were made during my wedding to my now ex-wife.  I suddenly realized that, mercifully,  I had no way to look at them. Who has a Hi-8 deck? And yet, I know that now I will never know the pleasure that my parents used to derive from flipping through their old 1953 wedding album and saying ‘He’s dead. She’s dead…” Many years after the fact.

The technology of black and white print photography done on paper allows me to still have that wedding album in some box somewhere, along with a deeply embarassing newspaper clipping from The Nassau Herald, title “Whiz Kid”, from the day I got accepted into Williams College.  Also, troves of old love letters from girls, who, when I google them, look disturbingly like their mothers, or worse.

But what of the Oxford English Dictionary and its move to online only.

Probably, from a financial point of view, this looks like a good idea. Cyberspace is a lot easier to print on than real paper and leather bindings.  It’s also a lot cheaper to distribute online than shipping heavy volumes all over the world. Finally, you can update minute-by-minute, adding or deleting words of the moment like LOL!, or ROTFLMFAO – which you still can’t use in scrabble, but give it time.

But is this the best move, from the long view?

In 1986, The BBC entered into the then Brave New World of hi-tech when it announced The Domesday Project.

The idea was to take the entire contents of The Domesday Book ca. 1086, and transfer it to laser optical discs.  Cool, huh?

For our younger readers, The Domesday Book was a complete registry of all the holdings – land, animals, and people in all of England by King William I, known as WIlliam the Conquerer (for obvious reasons). He wanted a list of everything he had.. conquered.

900 years later, the book, on paper, was still both accessable and readable – when The BBC decided to tranfer it all onto Optical Discs.

Now, here’s the bad part of the story.  A short twenty-six years after the BBC’s admirably ‘high tech’ project, The Optical Disc Domesday Book is no longer readable, because, apparently, there aren’t any more optical disc readers.

Hmmm.

Damn shame (as they say in the UK).  Fortunately, the paper version is still around and still accesable.

That may not be the case for the OED in another 900 years or so.