EH 478/578: Milton: Searching the OED

The quick search finds main dictionary entries, such as cat, break, or xylophone. It also finds phrases and compounds listed within main entries, such as to look up or alphabet book, and variant spellings such as dictionarie.

To search,

• Type the word you want to find in the Quick Search box at the top of the page.
  • Don't worry about punctuation, accents, hyphens, or capital letters

• One result will open automatically

• More than one result will open a list of entries with each word's first definition. Choose the entry you want.

• No results will return a list of closest matches alphabetically

An Advanced search is a full search of the entire dictionary text. It finds your term wherever it occurs in the dictionary. This could be in the form of an entry name, part of another word’s definition, in a quotation, etc. An Advanced search also allows you to search for words that occur near one another, such as bread before butter.

Some other features are:

• You can take the case into account in your search using the Case-Sensitive checkbox
• You can find accented or hyphenated terms by using the Exact Characters checkbox.
  • You can use their character palette so you don't have to know the Alt-key codes to these characters.

To search:

• Open the Advanced search page by clicking Advanced search under the Quick Search box.
• Type the word or phrase you want to find into the main search box at the top of the page.
• Click ‘search’.
• Each of the results consists of a headword and an excerpt from the first definition of the entry or subentry.
  • Click on any of the headwords in the list to open its entry.
  • Results will be listed alphabetically, but you can also choose to order them by frequency or date, or to jump to a particular alphabetical point by typing the letter you want into the input box and clicking ‘GO’.
• A message is displayed if there are no results.

As you can see from this example, many of the general keyword results have the word in its quotes. You can narrow using the filters on the right (Subject [food]; Language of Origin [French]; Region [Australia]; Usage [slang]; Date of entry [1800-2000]; Part of speech [noun]; or First Cited in).

You can choose to search items other than keywords. They are:

• Headword  - main titles of entries.
• Lemma - compounds and phrases that appear within the entries. (café finds internet cafe in the entry internet.)
• Variant spelling - variant spellings (color finds the entries choler, colour, hypercolour, and versicolour).
• Definitions - all the defined senses or meanings of the entry.
• Etymology - information on the origin of the word.
  • Language - searches language names only (e.g., Low German, Dutch, Frisian).
  • Cited Word– searches the cited word form only (e.g., brein, *bragno, etc.).
• Labels - brief information on the context in which that term is used. A label can give a term’s regional origin (e.g. U.S., Australia), the subject area from which it derives (e.g. Biology, Chemistry, Music), the status or level of language to which it belongs (e.g. slang, dialect), its grammatical function (e.g. plural, collective), and the type of meaning assigned to a word in a particular context (figurative, specific).
• Quotations - the examples from print and manuscript sources which illustrate each sense of an entry.
  • First Quotation - earliest recorded evidence for the use of a sense
  • Quotation Date
  • Quotation Author
  • Quotation Title - title of quoted work
  • Quotation Text

As with all database searches, use AND, OR, or NOT to search more than one term or to limit a search.