The revisions to the OED during the last quarter of 2011 mostly related to words beginning with A. Most of the entries had not been revised since the definitions were first written in the 1880s. When modern OED lexicographers set about the task of editing and amending the Dictionary, they decided to start at M, not A, believing that the second half of the Dictionary would be of a more even editorial standard than the first half. By the time they reached Z, they believed, they would be in the swing of the task of revising and so could tackle the more difficult letters.
In this A batch OED editors have sometimes changed the order in which the different definitions appear in order to portray the word's historical development more precisely. For the last 120 years, for instance, the first definition of the verb adhere was "To stick fast, to cleave, to become or remain firmly attached, to a substance, as by a glutinous surface, or by grasping, etc". That meaning is the meaning of adhere today. From December 2011 the first definition of adhere in the Dictionary is "To support a person (party, cause) steadfastly; to be an adherent or supporter of. Now rare and arch". This meaning had previously been listed as the second sense of the word. The OED editors have changed the order of definitions to put the first and original meaning of adhere (support a person) first.
In the case of the word accurate, the definitions after the revision are still fairly similar to the old definitions, and are in the same order, but definition 2, which in the previous edition was "Of things and persons: Exact, precise, correct, as the result of care", and definition 3, which was "Of things, without special reference to the evidence of care: Exact, precise, correct, nice; in exact conformity to a standard or to truth", have now become since last month "Of a person: careful, precise; tending not to make mistakes or errors; correct" (definition 2) and "Esp. of information, measurements, or predictions: exact, precise; conforming exactly with the truth or with a given standard; free from error" (definition 3). The word accurate derives from the Latin curare, to take care of, and the original editors of the OED, knowing this, felt that there thus had to be a reference to 'care' in all the definitions. Current OED editors feel that it was unnecessary and inaccurate to force a 'care' connection into each definition.
The other big task of the last quarter was to revisit all the Spenser citations in the Dictionary, of which there are 6266. When the original writers of the Dictionary in the 1880s wrote the Spenser citations they mostly used an 1869 edition of The Faerie Queene, which contained what were then modern spellings - hyphens were added, for instance, and u in words was replaced by v. Now the citations are taken from the first printings of Spenser's work in the 1590s. So, at the verb 'launch' the previous "A sharpe bore-speare, With which he wont to launch the salvage hart Of many a Lyon ", has been changed to "A sharpe borespeare, With which he wont to launch the saluage hart Of many a Lyon".
In addition to the above revisions, there are also well over 1000 new entries, new sub-entries and new senses of existing words that went into the Dictionary last month. I will look at those in tomorrow's post.