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Editorial Guidelines

Objectives

• Keep the word list as short as possible, but provide a high coverage of words in everyday modern usage.
• Faithful representation of words including hyphens, diaereses and diacritical marks.
• Accurate for British English.

Guidelines for including or excluding words

• Any word listed by the references (see below) as in common British English usage may be included. They will be accurately represented using appropriate diaereses, diacritical marks and/or hyphens if appropriate.
• Words listed as Americamisms, or mainly US usage are excluded.
• Words listed as Australian, South African, or other commonwealth may be included, although in time separate dictionaries are envisaged.
• Archaic words are likely to be excluded, particularly if there is a risk of confusion with more common modern words.
• Specialist words and jargon (legal, medical, engineering, computing etc.) are included if they appear in general usage and are unlikely to be confused with a similar but different common word.
• Slang is included where and when it occurs in general written literature.
• Abbreviations are included especially when they incorporate mixed cases and punctuation marks.
• Proper nouns are included to provide more comprehensive spelling coverage, but they are treated somewhat informally.
• Words usually written hyphenated are included particularly when there is a possibility of confusion with an (incorrect) unhyphenated form.

References

• Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 2nd edition 2002.
• Chambers Concise Dictionary, 2001.
• Concise Oxford Dictionary, 9th edition.