Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Encyclopedia : C : CO : CON : Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Concise Oxford English Dictionary (until 2002 officially entitled The Concise Oxford Dictionary, and widely known by the abbrevation COD) is probably the best-known of the 'smaller' Oxford dictionaries. It was started as a derivative of the Oxford English Dictionary, although section S–Z had to be written before the Oxford English Dictionary actually reached that stage.

The latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary contains over 240,000 entries and 1681 pages (concise only compared to its parent OED at over 21,000 pages).

Editors

First Edition (1911): H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler.
Second Edition (1929): H. W. Fowler alone (his brother had died in 1918).
Third Edition: H. G. Le Mesurier.
Fourth (1951) and Fifth (1964) Editions were prepared by E. McIntosh, who introduced the space-saving swung dash that stands for the headword.
Sixth Edition (1976): J. B. Sykes oversaw a thorough revision based on the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Seventh Edition (1982), also by Sykes; symbols were introduced to mark uses considered controversial or offensive.
Eighth Edition (1990): Robert E. Allen. Being computer-based, this edition changed the original structure to a large extent.
Ninth Edition (1995): Della Thompson.
Tenth Edition (1999, revised 2001): Judy Pearsall. Rather than being a direct revision of the ninth edition, it is based on the larger New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998), whose compilation had involved a re-analysis of much of the core vocabulary using the British National Corpus.
Eleventh Edition (2004): Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. It is based on the Oxford Dictionary of English (second edition).

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