Concise Oxford Dictionary - Definition and Overview

Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) is probably the best-known 'smaller' Oxford dictionaries. It was started as a derivative of the Oxford English Dictionary although section S-Z had to be written before the Oxford English Dictionary actually reached that stage.

Editors

• First Edition (1911): H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler.
• Second Edition (1929): H. W. Fowler alone, as his brother had died in 1918.
• Third Edition: H. G. Le Mesurier.
• Fourth (1951) and Fifth (1964) Editions were prepared by E. McIntosh, who introduced the space-saving swung dash that stands for the headword.
• Sixth Edition (1976): J. B. Sykes saw a thorough revision based on the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary.
• Seventh Edition (1982), also by Sykes, symbols were introduced to mark uses considered controversial or offensive.
• Eighth Edition (1990): Robert E. Allen, being computer-based, changed the original structure to a large extent.
• Ninth Edition (1995): Della Thompson.
• Tenth Edition (1999, revised 2001): Judy Pearsall. Rather than being a revision of the ninth edition, it is based on the larger New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998), whose compilation had involved a re-analysis of much of the core vocabulary using the British National Corpus.
• Eleventh Edition (2004): Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. It is based on the Oxford Dictionary of English (second edition).