NOPE NOPE NOOOOOPE fuck that man.
This isn’t enshittification, it was always a paid service. The extortionate price is aimed at universities and is sadly typical for anglophone academic pricings.
Anyway, OED is useful for scholarly purposes. Most users need a normal, smaller dictionary, not OED-level of detail. That’s fulfilled by dicts such as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate edition (at merriam-webster.com) and Oxford Dictionary of English (yes that’s different from Oxford English Dictionary).
If you really need OED, you can pirate the 2nd edition, since it was published as a program on CD. It’s on Rutracker, IIRC. Let me know if you can’t find it.
Paid products can be enshittified. Also, its not just the quality of products that are getting enshittified but the concept of ownership over usage and access to digital data.
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Slowly raising sub rates with that boiling frog tek.
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No longer providing means to purchase local copies of data on a CD-ROM when you did before, just to pigeon-hole buyers down a subscription only access to the cloud.
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Not offering a one time lifetime subscription in your sub-only model.
It used to be that you bought something and owned it physically or at least owned a private copy of the data that could be cracked/ stripped of DRM so you could truly freely own and distribute. Now they all want to be digital landlords where you own nothing and pay a little more each month through the good old boiling frog while pinning price increases on inflation. The mid-term result is a 100$/year to rent out digital access to a dictionary when before you could buy a cd copy.
Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument. Fuck that grift man. I know server infrastructure. It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.
It also cost practically nothing to distribute a digital file. So, Free digital access to educational and reference materials output by universities realistically should be a right in any sane society. Im sure Oxford University gets enough tax breaks and gov subsidy they could do it without impacting the stock holders precious quarterly figures. That entire 12 volume OED set + SOED takes up 500mb and can be fit on every modern tablet and phone. It sure as hell could be fit on a CD ROM years ago when they made that. The only reason its not is greed and maybe the dopamine rush scholars get from filtering the plebs.
Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument.
You don’t have to buy it, because I didn’t use the argument and never would.
It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.
If you think OED’s expenses can be boiled down to updating the database and keeping the site online, it means you still don’t understand what OED is and how it is produced.
I get the impression you’re primarily looking to be infuriated (perhaps appropriate given the community, but still) rather than to talk about this seriously.
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I feel like the people complaining here have no idea how much work is involved in compiling and maintaining the OED.
This is a full reference of the English language intended for academics and professional contexts, not just a place to check spelling.
Well, you can use it to check spellings too. Medieval and early modern spellings, even. Sometimes when seeing pedantic people online correcting others’ spellings, I used to check OED and find old texts where the “misspelling” existed normally. Ideally the first editions of Shakespeare, with forms such as “scornfull” instead of scornful, etc. So the pedants would either have to admit it’s not such a big mistake, or Shakespeare was illiterate too.
Anyway, yeah it’s drama for its own sake.
OTOH the price is too high, but that’s normal for English academic publications in general. It’s a very rotten market that’s not really aimed at individual buyers but at university libraries.
Aren’t there a bunch of old professors in some old English university doing that, paid by the government?
I’m so disappointed 😞
The most offensive part is the monthly price point. What goo between the ears business idiot convinced these people they could charge more than a Netflix (+ ads) subscription for the dictionary? You could literally buy a brand new one and set it on fire every month for that cost. Fucking leeches.
You couldn’t do that, OED is so massive they’re not even printing it anymore. Old sets are on Amazon for $1000+
It’s weird to talk about “the dictionary”, there’s no single default dictionary, they’re all different and this is a dictionary for specialists. It’s a historical dictionary, so it covers words and their usage from up to a millenium ago (although IIRC it doesn’t include words that haven’t survived into Modern English, so 400-ish years ago).
Oxford sells abridged dictionaries for under $10. 99% of people aren’t using it for 20 encyclopedias worth of etymological research, they’re using it to figure out how to spell a word or what it means.
Exactly, so why all the fuss about the inaccessibility of OED? Most people don’t need OED in particular, spellings and most relevant meanings can be checked in normal smaller dictionaries (although these days autocorrect solves most spelling problems before people would even think of checking a dictionary, and people even treat Google as a dictionary because it provides definitions when needed).
Not that the pricing isn’t awful and likely overblown, but that’s a different story.
so why all the fuss about the inaccessibility of OED?
Because the OED is the creme of the crop for dictionaries, particularly the SOED has some of the most well put together definitions of any dictionary for casual lookup. Because the 1200$ paywall they put behind the physical editions was always bullshit. Because they no longer have legitimate ways of purchacing a cheaper local digital copy when one was available before is bullshit.
Sure, wiktionary or webster might have an entry for the word but if you do side by side comparisions betweeen dictionary theyre mid compared to OED/SOED. If your reaching for one the logic should be that you want the best/most accurate and descriptive one possible, no?
I genuinely believe that universities have at least a moral obligation (HA!) to provide free public services that better humanity. These are places of education subsidized and given tax breaks by the government for gods sake, yet theyre so corrupt from the rich fucks that run them like a for-profit corporation.
I would make an argument that free access to the highest quality dictionaries thats the gold standard for scholarly reference and similar such materials should be closer to a digital right than anything. In a better world academia pricing structures get fucked, knowledge becomes truly open through digital online and local reference resources without DRM.
Of course, thats a pipe dream. So instead, I simply ask for the option of an updated CD rom to be released as a possible purchacing option in a DRM free format. You know, like they already did years ago.
I will buy a fucking printed edition and flip through pages before I pay a subscription for the fucking dictionary
It’s always surprised me that search engines don’t point to Wiktionary by default, and in fact usually don’t show it in search results on the first page.
Over the years, it has gotten better and better and now is an almost universal resource on all word forms. You see a word and don’t know what it means? You put it in the search bar at Wiktionary and the site will figure out it is the second person aorist of the passive voice of the Ancient Greek verb kataminomai, used only between the second and third centuries in the Hellenistic colonies of Mars. Made up example, of course, but the quality of the information is insane.
Double reminder that local offline copies of wiktionary.org dictionaries are available in Stardict, Tabfile and Kindle formats for download here: https://github.com/Vuizur/Wiktionary-Dictionaries
For the Kindle versions (yeah I still got one, I know, but not tossing a functional device!) that’s the
.mobiI presume? And how do I install that as a proper new dictionary? Does it auto-recognize that if I just copy it in the main folder?I don’t own/use a kindle but did a 2 minute search and found this promising fourm post comment from user Enterio https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360684
"On my Kindle (Paperwhite, 11th gen), the dictionaries are held in the “\documents\dictionaries” subfolder (I kept my firmware to an older version to keep my USB connection). When I bought them online (on Amazon, see Kindle Default Dictionaries category), I received pre-made MOBI files that I only had to place in the aforementioned subfolder, without converting them to other file formats. Afterwards, I set up my default dictionaries for every language on my Kindle in Settings → Language & Dictionaries → Dictionaries. Hope that helped. "
Reminder? This is how I found out at all!
You can probably get access through your local public library, if you’re on their Wi-Fi. OED has been like this for as long as I’ve been paying attention. Source: librarian and before that was annoyed at OED, but now I’m almost always on work Wi-Fi if I’m looking something up, so it’s invisible to me.
Yep, exactly this.
I use OED as my standard reference when writing - I can log in from anywhere with my library card number and get full access without paying a penny.
Merriam-Webster isn’t paywalled.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/
Looks like there’s a new definitive standard for the English language!
Also, the 1921 version of Merriam-Webster dictionary has entered public domain and is available for local download in stardict format here https://github.com/ahacop/websters-dict-1913-stardict
That is the definition of enshittification… right? I don’t know, I can’t check
Just one more example of how the internet will continue to create a big divide of people that can afford it, and those that can’t.
That is so stupid.
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.
Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary
In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes.[1] Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018.[1]
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.
Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.
We used the somewhat-smaller World Book Encyclopedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia
The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]
World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]
As of 2022, the only official sales outlet for the World Book Encyclopedia is the company’s website; the official list price is $1,199.
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 relative to other dictionaries.
But I don’t think that the world is worse off now than it was when one had to go buy a large print book (or a 20-volume set of books, if that’s how you swung) and then go haul it off the bookshelf when you wanted to reference it.
OED isn’t the only dictionary out there. Oh well.
Good luck with that, folks.
I mean, they have to pay the bills somehow. And this shows maybe how bad financially they’re off. Before the internet, you had to buy a copy of the book. I suspect those sales fell off a cliff in the last 25 years. So I may not like this decision but I can understand it.
And as others have suggested, there are other ways to get what you need online. This is a strong atmospheric disturbance in a serving vessel for hot infused beverages.
Oxford English Dictionary is directly funded by Oxford University. Im pretty sure a world class old money university can afford to subsidize public access and periodic updates to a digital dictionary database without putting it behind a subscription based paywall. At least they could try to offer a lifetime sub option.
They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.
As far as I can see their subscription prices have also only gone up over the years. Why? Do you think a Mr Burns like figure is sitting behind the scenes asking Smithers to relese the hounds? Or because running the linguistic operation, the database, and a website that people all over the world look at as the de facto authority of the language and gets queried thousands of times per day just cost shitloads of money? And they no longer get enough funding another way?
Did they ever put ads on their website? Do you run uBlock or similar plugins on your browser?
They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.
Maybe the £8.7 billion endowment university that employs them should make sure they’re adequately compensated for their work, and not people who want to know how to spell a word.
That’s a matter of opinion. I suspect a big university like that quickly spends its budget and does way more than compile a dictionary. And if spelling is all you need, that still appears to be possible in front of the paywall.
For the longest time, it wasn’t free of charge. You had to buy expensive books. I fail to see a justification for the outrage. Also considering that this thread is rife with suggestions for alternatives and more dodgy solutions.
In case anyone is wondering you can download a stardict of the shorter oxford english dictionary (and most of the other dictionaries mentioned in this thread!) and have a local copy then use software like stardict or svdc to look up. I actually put up a copy on the internet archive earlier this year. Good timing huh? https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11
Nah. Fuck OED. They’re not the only game in town.
That ain’t going to work out for them.
The Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is $1,400 in a hardback set, if you’d rather.
Well, that sure is an option, though one that I would rather not take, like ever.
Coincidentally a copy of the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition stardict is currently available for free on the internet, only requires approximately 200-300mb of storage space, can be installed on my e-reader or pc software of choice for potential automated database retrieval / RAG, ect ect.
Link please?
Sure! Heres links.
The full Unabridged 2nd edition (comes in 2 parts): https://archive.org/details/stardict-Oxford_English_Dictionary_2nd_Ed._P1-2.4.2
The Smaller condensed SOED edition: https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11
While your at it download the torrent link file themselves too in case these archives ever get taken down. I get the impression Oxford is particularly aggressive with takedown request so please consider seeding to keep these alive and easily accessable for others.
Updoot for the upstanding citizen! I wish you could do something with it.
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