Jargon Buster
Oxford Reading Programme
The Oxford Reading Programme exists to provide Oxford lexicographers
with evidence of how words are used today in the English-speaking world, and to
alert them to the emergence of new words.
The programme maintains a network of voluntary and paid readers who provide
editors with quotations which illustrate how words are used. Until recently
the quotations were kept on alphabetically filed slips of paper. They are entered
on a searchable database called Incomings which currently contains
some 62 million words; on average, 17,000 citations are sent in by readers every
month.
The Oxford Reading Programme has its origins in the programme of reading that
was started in 1857 for the Oxford English Dictionary. For
more information on the programme, see OED Online.
The Reading Programme has always been vital to the compilers and revisers
of the OED, who use quotations to document the history of a term from
its earliest to its most recent recorded usage. The programme is also used in
the preparation of smaller Oxford English dictionaries: today it supplements the Oxford English Corpus, and provides invaluable information on new words and
on English from around the world.
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