The Oxford English Dictionary is the focus of this chapter, which combines an examination of the printed dictionary with an exploration of the draft materials that went into making it. From 1884 to the appearance of its first Supplement in 1933, the OED’s documentation of same-sex lexis far outstripped that of any earlier dictionary. Yet the editors’ commitment to objectivity did not prevent them from reproducing many of the traditional biases of their precursors. At the same time, the rise of sexology in Britain led to the emergence of new taxonomies of erotic desire, ushering into public discourse terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, inversion, and uranism. While much of the scientific literature cast same-sex attraction as a psychological disturbance, other discourses soon emerged in the writing of apologists and activists who rejected pathologization, whether by reclaiming taxonomic terms, coining new, affirmative identity labels, or refusing to be classified altogether. The chapter inspects how the OED’s compilers grappled with representing these dominant and dissident usages, pulled as they were between the demands of scientific principles and social scruples.

This chapter looks beyond the temporal scope of the rest of book to the legacy of the OED’s empirical principles for contemporary dictionaries. The chapter argues that there are limitations inherent in any lexicographical model whose aim is to document a language as it is commonly and widely used. Though this ‘majority rule’ approach may seem democratic, it cannot help but marginalize people whose practices or identities—and the language by which they express them—diverge from dominant norms. While digital advances have enabled new ways of making dictionaries, from corpus-building to online crowdsourcing, these have not allowed lexicographers to evade the ideological pitfalls that surround the documentation of ‘minority usage’, whether present or past. The chapter closes with a reflection on the future of historical research into language and sexuality, both within the dictionary and beyond it.

Known as ‘the definitive record of the English language‘, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the largest dictionary of English in the world. This chapter traces its creation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day - through the publication of the first edition, supplement volumes, second edition, and the current third edition and OED Online website. The lexicograhic policies and practices of the various editors are also discussed, e.g. from Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall, and James Murray to Henry Bradley, Charles Onions, William Craigie, Robet Burchfield, John Simpson, Ed Weiner, and Michael Proffitt. This chapter also discusses the OED‘s current efforts to move from seeing the dictionary as a discrete text to seeing the dictionary as data which can be used in machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.

In modern lexicography, a core distinction has been made between diachronic and synchronic dictionaries, and English dictionaries are no exception. In fact, English dictionaries are at the centre of this debate, since the Oxford English Dictionary, a landmark scholarly undertaking of the nineteenth century, is arguably the most successful exposition of the diachronic approach to dictionary making. While many other historical language dictionaries have modelled themselves on the OED, the development of a more theoretical basis for synchronic dictionaries was largely led by English language learner dictionaries in the late twentieth century. This chapter seeks to explain the distinctions between diachronic, or historical, dictionaries and their synchronic counterparts; how the distinction arose in English lexicography; what it means for those using or writing dictionaries; and, perhaps, why it’s important. While there is some underlying theoretical basis, the story of dictionaries is overwhelmingly one of practice, the findings are based on illustrative examples from English dictionaries throughout. In conclusion, there is an assessment of how meaningful the distinction continues to be today, and what changes we might expect to see in the future.