From Badger to Bubble: Oxford Children's Dictionaries and the Oxford Children's Language Corpus

ABSTRACT:The Oxford Children's Word of the Year for 2021 was anxiety, reflecting the influence of two years of a global pandemic on children's language. Over the same period, new terms such as social distancing entered the language, and existing words like bubble took on new meanings. This paper describes the methods used by Oxford children's dictionaries to capture such changes and to use them to inform the development of dictionaries for children. It draws on examples from past and current children's dictionaries to show the development of key features, such as child-oriented definitions and citations from children's literature, and discusses the influence of external factors on dictionary content over the past decade. Case studies using the Oxford Children's Language Corpus (OCLC) show how it supports the creation of creative and innovative dictionaries such as the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary and curriculum-driven subject dictionaries like the Oxford Illustrated Computing Dictionary. The inclusion in the OCLC of data from the BBC 500 Words children's writing competition has also influenced the content of current dictionaries. Finally, the growth of digital platforms, apps, and educational technologies leads to a discussion of the potential role of automation in children's lexicography in the twenty-first century.