ABSTRACT

It almost goes without saying that the Internet has exercised a profound influence on lexicography in general, and on English lexicography in particular. Not only have publishers put their dictionaries, in all their variety, online, but the Internet has also affected how dictionary making itself is carried out. The World Wide Web represents a vast sea of data that lexicographers can search for evidence of word usage, or indeed for new words and new uses of words. The Oxford University Press dictionaries department, for example, has compiled the over 2-billion-word Oxford English Corpus from the Internet for this purpose. 1