🚀 go-pugleaf

> I think a long time ago (circa 1990) I remembered
> reading about a project out of university of waterloo
> in which they were doing a comphresive effort to put
> the complete oxford english dictionary into an
> electronic format.  Has this been done?

I don't know about the U of W-loo, but Oxford itself
put the dictionary on CD-ROM years ago.   In 1992 they 
came out with a far better version.  

I heard a radio interview with the leader
of the OED project, who described the travails of
some hapless grad student.  It seems this poor soul
had just spent 14 months researching Shakespeare's
influence on the English language and had accumulated 
several thousand citations.  He then when down to 
Oxford to try out this new-fangled electronic gizmo. 
In under a minute, the computer/CD-ROM combo unearthed
approximately 33,000 citations.

Reportedly, the grad student fainted dead away.

I'm not sure what the price is, but it's probably
going to be fairly high.

Jeremy Barth    IEEE, Inc.    jbarth@ieee.org