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John (Andrew) Simpson (b. October 13, 1953, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) is a British lexicographer and senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). As the chief editor of the (OED) and the individual responsible for the revised and updated third edition of the dictionary, the Simpson is considered to be the most important figure in contemporary English lexicography (a term that refers to the principles and science of dictionary-making). Simpson was a co-editor of the second edition, which ran to 20 volumes and was published in 1989, and directed the conversion of the OED’s vast printed resources into a streamlined electronic database, bringing the entire second edition on-line in March 2000. Simpson, who became the chief editor of the OED in 1993, is currently managing the first complete revision of the dictionary since it was originally published--the second edition was essentially a combination of the original text with the several supplemental volumes that had followed. For the third edition, each word is being examined and revised to improve the accuracy of the definitions, derivations, pronunciations, and historical quotations--a task requiring the efforts of a staff consisting of more than 300 scholars, researchers, readers, and consultants, and projected to cost about $55 million. As Simpson explained to James Eve for the London Times (March 9, 2000), "We think of it as the largest humanities research programme in the world." Mr. Simpson was born on October 13, 1953 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England; son of Robert Morris (in the Foreign Office) and Joan Margaret (a teacher; maiden name, Sersale). He received a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of York and a master's degree in medieval studies from the University of Reading. Simpson came to lexicography through studying English literature and philology, especially that of the medieval period. But much of the major lexicographical work in this early period of the language was at the time being undertaken in the United States and Canada. In 1976 he joined the editorial team of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a division of the Oxford University Press. His first task was working on neologisms (new words) for the supplement to the OED, which was then in its third of four installments. Much to his delight, he soon found himself applying the same analytical and historical techniques from his studies to modern-day English. He discovered that the historical techniques employed to define and describe the early stages of the language--that is, recording instances of actual usage as it appears in printed and written documents--are not dissimilar to those used to portray the language of today. That same year on September 25, he married Hilary Croxford (a local government officer) When Simpson joined the OED, the process of compiling the dictionary was essentially the same as it had been for the previous century, consisting primarily of the manual analysis of millions of index cards, each one containing a quotation as an example of linguistic usage. The assembling of quotations dates back to 1857, when the British Philological Society began to recruit volunteers to comb through literary works for citations of words to be included in what was then being called the "New English Dictionary." When James A. H. Murray became the editor of the project for the Oxford University Press, in 1879, he felt that the quotations compiled by the Philological Society were insufficient and unbalanced in their coverage, so he issued a request to the general public inviting anyone to send in examples of words they encountered in their reading for possible inclusion in the dictionary. The public responded enthusiastically; eventually as many as 2,000 readers, primarily from Britain and the United States, sent quotations to Murray, who directed a small team of scholars as they organized the submissions and validated their accuracy. From a total of 5 million submissions, nearly 1.8 million quotations were included in the first edition. Murray named the process the OED "Reading Programme," and it has continued relatively unchanged to the present day. In 1981 Simpson was appointed by Burchfield to serve as a senior editor to work on the supplement. The third volume was published in 1982; the fourth followed in 1986. The completed supplement, almost 6,000 pages in length, added 69,300 entries and 527,000 quotations to the total. Dictionaries, however, need to be updated constantly to remain current and useful. Adding yet another supplement was deemed inadequate by the editors, as that would require users to consult three alphabetical listings and the necessary cross-references to find a word. It was decided that the best solution was to merge the first edition with the supplements, as well as the many new words that had come into being, into a single, integrated compendium. Entries could be consolidated, duplicates deleted, and everything properly ordered and cross-referenced. The editors also realized that the traditional print method of compilation would be too cumbersome when dealing with such a mass of information, and that computers, which had only recently developed text-processing capabilities, were not simply the best alternative, but perhaps the only means of assuring a future for the dictionary. Work on the second edition was officially inaugurated in 1984; Edmund Weiner was appointed to be an editor, and Simpson joined him as soon as the supplement was completed, in 1986. Then 32 years old, Simpson was the youngest editor in the history of the OED. The British division of IBM donated a 4341 mainframe computer and other hardware, in addition to committing a small team of computer experts to manage the system. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database. More than 120 keyboarders were hired to input the entire text, consisting of 350,000,000 characters as well as the accompanying computer codes, into the database. The cost of the project reached $13.5 million, but Simpson and Weiner managed to meet the self-imposed five-year deadline. A. Walton Litz, an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, told Paul Gray for TIME (March 27, 1989), "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of a project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline." When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. The author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century," as quoted by Dan Fisher for the Los Angeles Times (March 25, 1989). TIME dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest," and Richard Boston, writing for the London Guardian (March 24, 1989), called it "one of the wonders of the world." The dictionary's size alone merits such : its 20 volumes contain 21,730 pages and weigh a total of 137 pounds. The text is about 60 million words long and includes 290,000 main entries (which is about 40,000 more than the first edition), definitions of about 600,000 word forms, and almost 2.5 million quotations. As co-editor of the second edition, Simpson had specialized in tracking down new influences on language. He was responsible for vetting the 5,000 new words (and new senses of existing words) that were included in the second edition. The majority of these were derived from developments in science, business, medicine, and North American slang; examples include yuppification, clone, breakdancing, ghetto blaster, basket case, credit union, AIDS, glasnost, Fortune 500, networking, and nose job. As a result, the language of the second OED, Simpson explained to Herbert Mitgang for the New York Times (March 22, 1989), "is not just the so-called King's English, or Queen's English, but the people's English." Neologisms have become a personal interest for Simpson, whose mind is always on the job: Philip Howard, who interviewed Simpson for the London Times (March 18, 1989), observed, "In his back pocket he carries a tatty notebook in which he disconcerts you by jotting down instances of new or unusual usage." It is no different with his reading; in an interview with Thomas J. Brady for the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 9, 2000), Simpson, noting that he was "reading some book on restrictions on printers in Elizabethan England link added," explained that, "You're on the hunt for interesting words when you're reading it as well. You underline them all the time." He doesn't have favorites, however--although he is frequently asked if he does. "It is a dreaded question, and EVERY interview asks it," Simpson remarked in an on-line chat for the Wordsmith Web site (December 19, 2000). "I make up a new one each time. Or I say 'the end' or something like that. If you're a historical lexicographer, you really don't have 'favourites'--they are all fascinating objects of study." The CD-ROM version of the second edition was released in 1992. The public finally had access to a computerized version of the text, which allowed for new ways of organizing and searching through the material. Simpson, after becoming chief editor of the OED in 1993, brought the dictionary into the Internet age with its on-line debut in 2000. "I think the OEDs first editor, James Murray, would have been quite pleased," Simpson remarked to James Eve. "He would have seen it as the obvious way for the dictionary to go. And in fact, the way that he structured the dictionary with its series of branches, nested senses, meanings and the way that the quotations are arranged converts very easily on to computer." In addition to bringing the OED on-line, Simpson is directing the first major revision of the dictionary in its history. Each entry is being reviewed in light of the improved availability of documentary evidence and the new developments that have taken place in linguistic scholarship over the years. For many of the words, earlier usages have been discovered and need to be added. Other words, whose meaning has shifted since their inclusion, need to be brought up to date with quotations expressing their current meaning. Historical notes, updated pronunciations, and lists of variant spellings will also be added. The end result is expected to double the overall length of the text. The style of the dictionary will also be changing slightly. The original text was more literary, in that most of the quotations were taken from novels, plays, and other literary sources. The new edition, however, will make reference to all manner of printed resources, such as cookbooks, wills, technical manuals, specialist journals, and rock lyrics. The pace of inclusion of new words has been increased as well, to the rate of about 4,000 per year. These are being added to the on-line database in quarterly installments. Readers will be treated to such words as "Bollywood," a blend of the names Bombay and Hollywood that refers to India's film industry, and "doh," an exclamation of frustration popularized by the animated television show The Simpsons--although the OED editors were able to trace its use back to the 1950s. Other words derive from technology, such as MP3, network appliance, and weblog, and new business jargon, such as e-tailing (for on-line retailing). Simpson cautions, however, that the heavy influx of new words should not necessarily be construed as evidence that our society is any more linguistically inventive than in the past. "Every generation thinks it lives in the most creative and abundant period," he explained to James Eve, "but the truth is that we probably won't know for another 25 years what language was like in the year 2000." Simpson elaborated, "As far as the OED is concerned, there's certainly a peak in coinages in Shakespeare's time and then another at the end of the 19th century, but that may be more representative of the reading of OED contributors than of the actual changes in language itself." There are some societal changes, however, which have had an effect on the current state of the language. "It doesn't take so long for a new word, particularly a slang word, to find its way into print," he told Eve. "Literature has become far more demotic." The OED’s small army of devoted readers continue to contribute quotations; the department currently receives about 200,000 a year. Nowadays, many of the submissions are made via e-mail. The millions of old word cards the OED has catalogued over the last century and a half, many of them handwritten, are still kept at OED’s offices in Oxford. Simpson told James Eve that he sometimes feels a little nostalgic when he looks through them. "In some ways it's a pity that so much editing and research is now done on computer. You can tell with the old scripts whether they date from the 1930s or the 1950s or whenever, and even to some extent what the writer was feeling that day: if their writing was a little bit hasty, or lazy. Sometimes they wrote little things on the corners. It's quite fascinating." Simpson, who is considered a world expert on proverbs and slang, has published articles in Medium AEvum, English Today, and other lexicographical and linguistic periodicals. In 1982 he edited the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (now in its third edition), a work characterized as "very jolly" by Philip Howard. He also co-edited the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (1992). Simpson is a member of the English Faculty at Oxford and of the Philological Society. In 1991 he became a Supernumerary Fellow of Kellogg College, at Oxford, along with his colleague Edmund Weiner. In 1999 he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Australian National University, in Canberra, for contributions to lexicography. Simpson lectures widely on language, lexicography, and the research underway at the OED. In a recent article in the London Times (September 12, 2003), he justified the rarified work of the OED, even working with words considered obsolete by some. "You need to distinguish between the word and the thing. Crompton's mule (the old spinning machine) is obsolete as a thing, but it's very much alive (in history texts) as a word." English words thought dead are often "surviving and frequently used, if you read the right books or talk to the right people." In his spare time Simpson captains a local village cricket team in Oxfordshire. Simpson has two children, Katharine Jane and Eleanor Grace.
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