This review will compare OALD8 with many of its competitors such as, LDOCE5, MED2, CALD3, Cobuild5, MWALD, and even with its own predecessor. If necessary, non-EFL dictionaries will also be mentioned.
Nearly five years have passed since the release of its predecessor, OALD7. In view of the intervals at which similar products update their products, five years are adequate for a new edition to be well prepared. Taking a closer look at the print version, one can hardly find obvious changes. According to the messages on back cover, 1000 new words and meanings have been added. We do see the following words show up in this edition:
biofuel, malware, blogosphere, robocall, slow food, Skype, upsell, ...
I chose a few words from The Language Report, edited by Susie Dent, and looked them up in OALD8. The interesting results were that "Carbon allowances" could not be found. "Cyberbullying", the issue that had hit the headlines from time to time, was not there either. It's good to see "elephant in the room" was included; however, "moose on the table" was still missing. No computing-related meaning was appended to "zombie", though "botnet" has been covered. However, in general, no need to be serious about new word topic, which is promotional hype in a way.
This new edition has 1938 pages in total, a gain of over 30 pages in contrast to OALD7. A 32-page Oxford Writing Tutor is new to OALD8, from which learners of academic and formal writing can benefit greatly. I would recommend learners of writing should not forget another helpful guide, Improve your Writing Skills, in the middle of MED2.
Oxford 3000 is the most important keywords from a foreign learner's perspectives. Any headword of Oxford 3000 is shown with a key symbol following. It has been the best way OALD addressed word frequency until the 7th edition. In contrast, MED2 marks its frequent words with one to three stars; LDOCE5 highlights its frequency by using W and S to indicate written and spoken situation respectively, and 1 to 3 to indicate frequency range from 1000 to 3000. OALD7 appears to be the least accurate in marking word frequency. Now in OALD8, the key symbol goes into specific definitions, within polysemous entries, to mark the important ones.
Let's take a look at the CD-ROM. As B. T. Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell have stated in The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (OGPL), there is always the difficulty to cram more information into limited page space. That's true. We can see by viewing the current dictionaries in the past few years that new ideas introduced to their print versions are rare. The world of paper dictionary is relatively mature in terms of modern lexicography.
However, it is a totally different story when it comes to CD-ROM dictionaries. Many of the lexicographic concepts have to be reviewed and reinforced. A rule Michael Rundell stresses in OGPL says "Another option is to begin the description of each new sense on a new line. This is appealing: the page looks less cluttered and users find it easier to locate the meaning they want. But it all takes up space, and that means a reduction in the amount of information that can be included." Anyone can easily understand editor's concern over a paper dictionary.
A good example illustrates how careless editors made dictionaries. Here are two screenshots of Concise Oxford English Dictionary, v1.0, date of release: July 2004, and v2.0, date of release: August 2009. The good rule has been completely forgotten.
Luckily, OALD8 even starts its examples on new lines, which was still not seen in OALD7, and even better the wheel on mouse is functioning well. Mouse wheel problem has been so tricky that epidemic is not an exaggerated term for it since most CD-ROM dictionaries suffered from it more or less for a long time. In OALD7, mouse wheel is not working at all. Even this function is revived, it just live up to the basic requirement.
With the relief of the persistent problems, one might think OALD8 may be a perfect version. Just read on for more details. Among all six players in learner's dictionary market, Arial font is used in most places to display the major contents, while this new version uses Times Roman font. It is really a disaster on seeing the examples displayed in italics. The two screenshots of OALD7 and OALD8 will show you the fact.
The OALD7 screenshot shown here is a modified edition, in which top banner and right column are customizable. One can switch them on or off by clicking on the options at the top right corner. In addition to this, mouse wheel function has been restored. The thin-and-single-lined characteristic of Arial font make the whole typeface neat and pleasant to vision. In contrast, Times Roman font tends to be bulky and vague, not easy for eyes to tell the words. Times Roman font may be fine in paper version; however, computer screen displays any font and image in dot-matrix format.
Reading the content of an entry on OALD7, a user will never know there may be related information in Cultural Guide. Now on OALD8, CG section is better integrated with dictionary. Some entries of CG are listed in alphabetical order with dictionary ones, some are displayed in right panel by clicking on CULTURE links. For quite a few entries, on OALD7, the problem of unequal volume between British and American pronunciations was easily noted. OALD8 has fixed these faults. More audio has been added to CG entries and most run ons in dictionary.
Few can deny the fact that LDOCE5 enjoys an immense popularity among learners' communities. From LDOCE4 to LDCOE4v2, and then to LDOCE5, each update demonstrated a great leap. The full-sentence audio, thesaurus, collocations, register remark, all contribute to its success, and makes it the archrival of all competitors. Given the ambition OALD8 has had, I will compare more features between the two. One thing worth mentioning is that the original LDOCE5 user interface is far from perfect. Someone has modified and improved it greatly. The major improvements are mouse wheel function repair, right panel hiding, and top banner hiding, to name a few. What OALD8 is to challenge is the modified LDOCE5.
Though OALD8 remembers to start new examples from new lines, the British pronunciation, NAmE pronunciation, Verb form, Word origin, Thesaurus, Example bank, etc also take up a single line. With these hyperlink-like information wedged in between headword and definition, the contents look very scattered. Even worse, the area on which each hyperlink-like information can be clicked to trigger extra data display extends throughout horizontally. In normal operation, I keep clicking on these links mistakenly and open the dynamic right panel. What an annoying design!
There are more to be desired with OALD8. The guide word, short cut as is named in OALD8, is not eye-catching enough. Just take a look at how LDOCE5 deal with it. Bright blue shading and white words in block capitals. In addition to this, a Menu link is ready to show a list in a pop-up windows. MED2 provides a Menu right below polysemous headwords to show guide words. Guide word is such a smart mechanism that can help dictionary user spot the information s/he wants in a shortest time.
Let's look at a sentence like this:
Now, as the Yankees take the field in their showdown with the Cubs, the crowd boos Ruth.
A learner may want to know what "take the field" means. S/he is likely to browse all the contents under the headword "take", and fails to find a good match. Then s/he turns to the contents under "field". All this is a standard procedure in paper dictionary scenario. However, learners nowadays will never do it like this. The design of a CD-ROM dictionary is to fulfill this kind of search requirement. In other words, for any search, a good CD-ROM dictionary is supposed to let user know whether the word or phrase in search of is included or not. If yes, let user spot the information. And this task has to be done within 10 seconds.
Given the tough search requirement, OALD7 and OALD8 are relatively less powerful. That is to say, one tends to spend more time to locate the word or phrase s/he is looking for in OALD7 and OALD8. It is sad to discover that OALD8 is even less powerful than its predecessor for certain searches. Take the following searches for example. What do the following phrases mean: "beef up", "root out", "hunt down"? OALD8 replies with zero result in response to the searches like these. Thus the software looks idle when these phrases are keyed in for search. All the other dictionaries, even OALD7, can deal with these searches very well.
More phrases are used to test the power of OALD8, and the results are as follows: the response to the check "call for" brings user to verb section of "call." Where is "call for"? User can only browse for it with eyes. What about the search for "carry out"? OALD8 shows us "carry-out". To find "carry out", user has to search "carry", and browse down, searching for "carry out" with eyes. Another search is for "face the music". OALD8 spots the verb section of "face". Likewise, user's eyes have to take over the rest of the task.
What's wrong with OALD8? Other dictionaries are doing very well and react quickly to these searches. OALD8 may take user more than 3 minutes on a task that can be completed not more than 10 seconds on other CD-ROMs. Anyone who is new to CD-ROM dictionaries could be a little shocked on finding the flaw like this. However, what happens here is just the history repeating itself. The aforementioned "begin the description of each new sense on a new line" is just another vivid example. And we will have more in the following paragraphs.
On LDOCE5 CD-ROM, collocations, thesaurus, phrase bank, and example bank are added to demonstrate the large capacity of the electronic media. LDOCE5 even stores its data on a DVD-ROM, which is 6 or 7 times the capacity of a CD-ROM. In recent years, more and more dictionaries provide extra data on CD-ROM. Some have substantially boosted the overall value, some have not. The key points are that how good the data are? How they are organized? How can they be searched?
MED2 provides thesaurus, but not good enough. CALD3 offers Extra Examples, SMART thesaurus. Cobuild5 comes with a mini corpus, WordBank, which looks terribly chaotic, but proves extremely helpful since it is covered by full-text search. Most extra data on LDOCE5 DVD-ROM are useful, well organized, and friendly to search. OALD8 may have borne this target in mind in the process of revision. Let's take a look at how good they are.
Example bank does contain more sentences than it did on OALD7. It is a vast improvement, but may just be enough to catch up with LDOCE5. Synonym section on OALD8 provides words of similar meanings in groups and explains the subtle nuances of meanings among words. The format of this section is very close to that of Oxford Learner's Thesaurus. But there is thesaurus section on OALD8. What does this section provide? The words of close meanings are given in series, with related words showing up together. One might think they mix the functions of thesaurus and collocation. Two screenshots here show you why. Screenshot1, screenshot2.
What do collocations data look like? Oxford Collocations Dictionary, 2nd edition may have demonstrated quite a few typical examples. When one checks "sense" in OCD2, s/he will see:
have ~, lose ~, heighten ~, sharpen ~, ... (collocations with verb)
acute ~, developed ~, keen ~, .... (collocations with adjective)
One may be surprised to find there is no collocation information under the headword "sense" on OALD8. Instead, there is thesaurus information and here they are:
a strong sense/feeling/impression/idea/sensation
and
get/give sb/leave sb with/convey a/an sense/feeling/impression/idea
The collocation information is, in fact, hidden in thesaurus.
On seeing all these, users might be very curious about what is inside the collocations section of OALD8, and how they are organized. According to R18 in back matter, OALD8 provides only 43 sets of collocation. Let's take a look at an example, say "crime". Here is the screenshot. It is totally different from what we see in OCD2, and is something like collocations created on top of thesaurus. It looks like a theme-oriented one that follows the original idea proposed by Peter Mark Roget in 1852. But wait, the hierarchical topology is not shown here as SMART thesaurus does in CALD3.
To anyone's surprise, the synonyms, thesauruses, collocations sections on OALD8 contain information that is not quite like what we think they should be. In contrast, LDOCE5 provides information pinpointing every specific entry more accurately. In addition to these, when one is interested in knowing what can collocate with more words like these: sea, path, different, river, complaint, signal, poll, idea, night, to name a few, s/he will definitely be frustrated with the deficiency of such common information.
What else is on OALD8 CD-ROM? iWriter is an interactive writing training tool, which is for those who has gone through Writing Tutor and wants to write. Advanced search in this edition provides the very basic functions. Lemmatization is not implemented. Lemmatization in advanced searches was carried out very well on LDOCE4v2, but has gone on LDOCE5, and has never been done in any version of OALD. It shows again how history is repeating itself. Good functions just come and go. The Merriam-Webster's interface, including Collegiate and Unabridged, may be the only one on which lemmatization is still working.
Overall, OALD8 is trying hard to achieve its ambition. Unfortunately, the patchy and ill-organized data do not boost its usefulness, and the loss of search power could be even fatal. OALD still needs to do a lot to attain seamless integration of all types of data. This edition has shown its direction, and it is hoped that it wouldn't get lost again in the future.
Another issue worth mentioning is that a very useful reference, Longman Language Activator 2nd edition, is fully integrated in LDOCE5 DVD-ROM. This 1500-page reference, alone, is extremely accessible and helpful to foreign learners for encoding uses. OUP does not lack excellent comparable products. Oxford Collocations Dictionary, 2nd edition and Oxford Learner's Thesaurus are two perfect candidates. Longman has made it. Why did OUP fail to? It is a major issue OUP decision-makers have to mull over.
EndNote:
I am deeply indebted to OUP Taiwan for a free copy of OALD8.
References:
- Cowie, A. P. 2007. English dictionaries for foreign learners: A history. New York: Oxford University Press
- Landau, Sidney I. 2001. Dictionaries: The art and craft of lexicography. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Atkins, B. T. Sue, Michael Rundell. 2008. The Oxford guide to practical lexicography. Oxford: Oxford University Press
