Find out about the latest OED tools and functionalities
The OED Labs initiative will help to shape the future of the Oxford English Dictionary, and we believe the research community is an integral part of this evolution.
The wealth of language data in the OED can currently be searched only through the oed.com website. Our aim is to offer researchers new, more direct and more flexible ways to access this massive curated dataset and to gain richer insights in the English language than ever before.
OED Labs invites scholars to contribute to the creation of new functionalities for the exploration of the OED dataset.
We want to work with those at the cutting edge of academic research across all disciplines to review and refine new ideas for the benefit of this community.
Through OED Labs, researchers will help shape the development of new digital tools that harness the power of the OED and help us to reimagine how this unique resource can be shared and accessed to aid the evolution of academic research.
Find out about the latest tools and functionalities our team are developing:
The OED Text Annotator beta has been designed to annotate texts written between 1750 and the present day using lexical information derived from the OED.
To use the OED Text Annotator beta, you simply upload your text as a plain-text file and the approximate date when the text was written; this can help to improve the accuracy of annotation.
As part of our exploration of new ways for researchers to harness the power of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dataset, we are currently investigating ways to provide filtered, downloadable wordlists from the OED dataset.
We have developed a proof of concept application to enable researchers to build customizable searches specific to their needs and interests. Results can be previewed in a browser, before being exported as an easily analyzable CSV or JSON file.
We have now completed the testing period for this tool, but if you would like to become a tester of future OED tools, we encourage you to join the OED Researchers Advisory Group to be kept up-to-date with future tools in development.
Learn more about the OED Researchers Advisors Group.
The OED Researcher API offers a range of endpoints to enable academic researchers to query, retrieve, and interact with OED content in sophisticated, customized ways.
We have developed a prototype of the OED Researcher API and are looking for researchers interested in using this tool in their work to test the tool and share ideas to inform its development.
The OED Text Visualizer is an interactive tool designed to display information about the origin, usage, and history of words in a visual format. Enter an excerpt from an English text (historical or contemporary) and the tool will use OED data to analyse and annotate the language and generate a simple visualization of the analysis. The results can also be downloaded in CSV format for further exploration using your own tools.
We have developed the OED Text Visualizer (beta) to give researchers a flavour of the functionality and invite feedback on the tool’s usefulness to research, suggestions for its improvement, and more.
The OED Lemmatizer is a tool designed to normalize spelling variation in historical texts. Enter a historical text with the origin date and, by retrieving tagged information from the OED dataset, the Lemmatizer outputs the original text with the relevant OED lemma for each spelling variation. The tool enables users to explore further OED information for the lemmas within the platform or export a new version of the historical document annotated with OED data.
We have developed an initial, small-scale example of the OED Lemmatizer and are keen to hear from researchers how they anticipate they might use such a tool on a larger scale in their research, and what formats and features would be most useful for this work.
Watch the video to learn more about the OED Lemmatizer: