| Summary: | <p>The start of the online publication of OED3 almost exactly coincided with the establishment of an OED editorial office in America, so that editorial work on North American terms could be handled by native speakers. Much of this work was of an expected sort: drafting new words that derived from, say, rap music; pointing out differing American nuances in existing entries; or revising usage notes or metalanguage for terms not used, or used quite differently, in one variety of English.<p><p>However, it soon became clear that there were additional and unexpected subtleties. The defining language of the OED is British English, and all definitions must be understandable to speakers of any regional variety. However, many words depend on a background cultural knowledge that cannot easily be expressed in a dictionary definition, at least not without rendering the definition almost absurdly overspecific to speakers already familiar with this knowledge.</p><p>In this paper I will look specifically at sporting terms, which provide an excellent subject for such concerns. The definitions of many baseball and American football terms in OED2 were not strong, though in many cases it turned out that this was not due to erroneous treatment on the part of the original editors, but because the concepts involved were so foreign to British speakers that there was no straightforward way to explain them. Conversely, when the North American office began to draft entries for American sporting terms, the definitions were often sent back with comments indicating that an apparently unavoidable term in the definition was completely impenetrable to British speakers. I will show various examples from the OED's revision process, explaining the complications they raised, how we dealt with them, and how such examples illustrate the broader kind of issues that the OED regularly deals with during the revision process.</p></p></p>
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