3 June 2011
I just found an odd entry. It’s nothing big, just an oddity that I want to point out. While searching the OED for something else, I was offered a cross-reference to the term riot girl. Curious, I clicked on it. I found out that a riot girl was a member or follower of one of the many female rock bands that flourished in the 1990s. Fine enough, a neat little bit of social history. But then I noticed the citations. In every single one, the term is spelled riot grrrl or riot grrl. Yet the dictionary’s head word uses the conventional spelling girl. Did the OED simply regularize the spelling for the headword?
But the dictionary does have a separate entry for grrrl to accommodate this spelling variation. Why have a separate entry for this, and not include it as a variant sense and spelling under the main headword for girl, yet standardize the spelling for riot girl? Given that this is online, it’s easy enough to allow the search function to point those who spell it riot girl to the right entry. Both entries were in the batch that was published in December 2001, so they went through editorial review at roughly the same time (and perhaps were even written by the same person). What’s going on here? Is this an oversight, or is there some arcane editorial standard at work here?
(I haven’t included links to the entries because I’m not sure how to generate a generic link to the OED anymore. The links that I use all go through the University of Toronto servers and are useless to anyone not using the U of T system. If anyone knows the correct URL syntax for a generic OED entry, please let me know by email or in the discussion forums. In any case, it’s easy enough to find these entries using the dictionary’s search function.)
[Edit: corrected spelling error, 13 June]
