The Canadian Oxford Dictionary

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, writes editor Katherine Barber in the
preface, is the result of “five years of work by five Canadian
lexicographers examining almost twenty million words of Canadian text
held in databases representing over 8,000 different Canadian
publications.” The dictionary’s 130,000 entries, which reflect
Canadian spelling preferences and favored Canadian pronunciations,
include 2,000 Canadianisms, 6,000 place names (1,200 of them Canadian),
short biographies of “over 800 Canadians and 5,000 individuals and
mythical figures of international significance,” and more than 400
historical events. J.L. Chambers, who served as an editorial adviser on
the book, contributes a lucid and erudite essay on the history of
Canadian English. A “Guide to the Use of This Dictionary” and four
short appendixes round out the volume.

The lexicographers, who drew upon a Canadian database that included
everything from Inuit Art Quarterly to Ontario Hog Farmer, have come up
with Canadianisms that you won’t find in other Canadian dictionaries.
Consider the initialism ACW: Oxford gives the Canadian definition
(Anglican Church Women) followed by the U.K. one (aircraftwoman); the
1997 edition of The Gage Canadian Dictionary provides only the latter
definition; and The ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary has no entry for ACW.
And when it comes to coarse slang, Oxford ventures where its prim
competitors dare not (from fist-fucking to sixty-nine).

In assembling the dictionary’s Canadian vocabulary, the
lexicographers focused special attention on “economic activities,
sports, and pastimes of particular interest to Canadians.” “Thus,”
continues Barber in her preface, “the vocabulary of logging and wheat
farming, of commercial fishing and mining is found alongside the very
abundant vocabulary of figure skating, sport fishing, and hunting.
Another area of thorough research was the culture of Aboriginal peoples
of Canada.”

There are anomalies. For example, there’s an entry for Spanish tenor
José Carreras but none for the Canadian-born diva Teresa Stratas. (In
Nelson, the reverse is the case.) The occasional misstep is inevitable,
however, in a project as ambitious as this one. In the increasingly
crowded landscape occupied by Canadian dictionaries, this latest entry
has assumed pride of place.