Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru Annual Report 2009-10

The Dictionary staff have been working diligently through the end of the letter A and the beginning of B. Part 10, up to the word bil¹, was published in July and the drafting and subediting of Part 11 have now been completed.

 To give an idea of the exhaustive nature of the re-editing, it is worth noting that the first ten parts of the second edition contain over 2,700 new entries, an increase of 28%, and that the number of illustrative quotations have gone from less than 28,000 to over 68,000 – an increase of around 40,000. Many more recent quotations have also been included: 1,785 from the nineteenth century and 2,276 from the twentieth century and later. The definitions too have been greatly refined and they are now considerably more detailed than they were in the first edition. The Welsh definitions have increased by around 82% and the English synonyms by 74%.

 Since February 2010, Dr Jenny Day has been working on a pilot scheme to try to estimate how many new words there are that could be added throughout the alphabet to bring the Dictionary up to date and also to estimate how long that is likely to take. This information will be of great value in planning future work.

 The aim is to create an easily searchable and flexible Web resource. The exhaustive re-editing will continue throughout the alphabet, but at the same time it will also be possible to include new words anywhere in the work, to correct errors and cross-references, to redate texts, improve etymologies, and so on, without having to wait until the next full edition. In addition to this, we will be able to prioritize the re-editing of some important words that otherwise would perhaps not receive attention for years.

 Ever since the Centre took over the responsibilities of the Board of Celtic Studies, Mrs Glenys Howells as the Centre's Editorial Officer, has been of invaluable assistance to the Dictionary. She verified thousands of quotations and we are greatly indebted to her for her thoroughness and attention to detail. We would like to wish her a very happy retirement. It is a pleasure to welcome Glenys’s successor, Dr Gwen Gruffudd, who has already made a significant contribution to the work. It is also a pleasure to be able to thank all the Dictionary’s benefactors, who are far too numerous to name individually, among them Professor Emeritus R. Geraint Gruffydd, the Consulting Editor, and Mr Gareth Bevan, the Honorary Editorial Consultant, both of whom have assisted and advised the entire staff, as well as other volunteers who read the proofs and serve as specialist consultants. We must note in particular the countless contributions sent by Dr Bruce Griffiths. The Dictionary benefits greatly from all these voluntary favours and every contribution and suggested improvement is appreciated.

 In light of the decision to quote fully from the last two centuries from C– onwards, we launched an appeal for twentieth- and twenty-first-century books. We have already received scores of volumes to supplement our library. Further contributions, be they books, periodicals, or, preferably, electronic texts, would be most welcome, but we would prefer initially to receive details only, because of limited space and in order to avoid duplicates.

 Andrew Hawke delivered a paper on re-editing the Dictionary at a conference on historical lexicography held at Oxford in June, and Sarah Down gave a presentation on our work in the University of Wales tent at this year’s National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale.

 During the year, work began in earnest on detailing the requirements of a new editing system for the Dictionary. M. Phillippe Climent of IDM (a Paris-based company) visited the staff on 16 April. Later, in July, Andrew Hawke attended the Euralex International Congress of Lexicography at Ljouwert [Leeuwarden] in Friesland, in the Netherlands, partly in order to hold discussions with four of the leading software companies in the field of lexicography. We intend to select and acquire four elements of the work over the coming year: (1) the editing system itself adapted for the project, (2) the conversion of all the Dictionary’s existing data to comply with that system, (3) the creation of a Web interface for the electronic Dictionary, and (4) the provision of a corpus query system to enable the staff to interrogate the Dictionary’s text corpora.

 The Dictionary has been awarded additional funding by the University of Wales to assist in the process of selecting and implementing the new hardware and software systems for these important developments. A business plan will soon be submitted to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales in the hope that we can secure its continued support for the Dictionary’s work.

 Therefore, next year we aim to complete the letter B and implement the computer systems necessary to bring the Dictionary into the twenty-first century. We can then begin work on the newly-transformed Dictionary as a Web resource, accessible to all. In the meantime, we intend to start treating the last two centuries in the same way as earlier periods by quoting examples more extensively from that productive and important period. The next few years will certainly be challenging both financially as well as in terms of the workload, but we believe that the Dictionary is in a strong position to move forward confidently to a bright digital future.