Comment on Online Oxford English Dictionary puts definitions/meanings and usage behind paywall
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
That is so stupid.
Comment on Online Oxford English Dictionary puts definitions/meanings and usage behind paywall
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
That is so stupid.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time. Then you can pay money to have a better time.
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
To be fair, if you go back to the pre-Internet era, the OED was pretty expensive in print. Your library might have had a copy, but most people wouldn’t.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary
Most people don’t have a 20 volume dictionary floating around the house.
When I was growing up, our house used the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.
That’s pretty beefy for a single book, but it’s a far smaller and less-costly dictionary than the OED.
Various libraries near me might have had an OED, but I don’t think I ever used it there, either.
My guess is that if you were gonna have a big set of reference books, you’d probably be more likely to have an encyclopedia set, maybe get Encyclopedia Britannica, not the Oxford English Dictionary.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica
We used the somewhat-smaller World Book Encyclopedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia
I think that the idea of a large, expensive, many-volume print home reference work is probably fading into the past with the Internet, but it used to really be something of a norm.
The OED in print today costs $1,215, and you can still get the thing. So that’s pretty comparable to the pre-Internet past.
They also sell online subscriptions for $100/year. I think that most people with a home set likely didn’t bother to replace their encyclopedia or dictionary and just let it get out of date, so they probably didn’t get an OED set and replace it every 12 years (well, discount the cost of financing there) so online access would cost more…but it’s probably not wildly worse.
$100/year is definitely not worth it for me for OED access, but, then, neither is the print edition, and that’s been the long-run norm for what someone would get if they wanted the OED.
Honestly…considers I don’t think that I actually even have a print dictionary. I used to have a little vest-pocket dictionary that was floating around somewhere, but not a standard bookshelf reference. Just too many freely-available online ones. If I bought one, I probably would not buy the OED.
I do think that the paywall will make the OED less-relevant, though.