Business News

iFactory Announces the Launch of the New Oxford English Dictionary Online

Thursday 16. December 2010 - 600,000 words... 3 million quotations... more than 1,000 years of the English language... the new Oxford English Dictionary Online has launched!

iFactory, an award-winning digital design and development firm, together with Oxford University Press, is thrilled to announce the revamp of the innovative online iteration of the most authoritative and comprehensive record of the English language.
James Gleick noted in the New York Review of Books, “The OED… has evolved into an enterprise of cyberspace, rather than a mere book… the renovation has turned a cottage into a palace.”
Robert Faber, Editorial Director, Scholarly and General Reference at OUP said, “With the new OED website, we were able to unlock fresh insights into how the English language has been used across the centuries, by adding new ways to browse, search, and visualize the information.” Faber added, “iFactory has been a great partner to work with on such a core project — they brought real creativity in design, understanding of user behavior, and engineering savvy — but they also understand the importance and value of the OED to its many readers.”
Built on iFactory’s publishing platform, PubFactory, the new OED adds dynamic search capabilities as well as a multitude of features including:
Search and browse by subject, region, usage, or by language of origin
Explore by time; search results can be displayed as a timeline allowing the user to see when words have come into the language, e.g. words from Japanese or words related to astronomy
Related links at entry level to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Dictionaries Online (both iFactory projects) and other online resources
Create your own profile and save entries and searches
“The new version of the OED Online is a project that we wanted to do for many years,” said Tom Beyer, Director of Publishing at iFactory. “The OED offers such a rich data set that there were endless possibilities for providing compelling user interface experiences. We were especially pleased with the timeline charting feature and the deep integration with the Historical Thesaurus. This truly was one of the development opportunities of a lifetime.”