Lexico

» see lexico.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i write in english every working day and i am not a native speaker, so a dictionary tab has been open on my machine for twenty years. for most of the 2010s the free oxford definitions were a fixed point in that habit. what i never registered was that the fixed point moved three times.

oxford university press put its dictionary content on the open web in 2010 at oxforddictionaries.com, and renamed it oxford living dictionaries six years later. the third name arrived in june 2019 as lexico.com, a joint venture where oxford supplied the lexicography and dictionary.com ran the site. the content was serious. it carried the oxford dictionary of english and the new oxford american dictionary with their matching thesauruses, and a spanish side that did monolingual and bilingual lookups.

it lasted three years and two months. on 26 august 2022 the partnership ended, lexico.com went to a redirect, and everything landed on dictionary.com. oxford kept its own paid products running and nothing about the underlying scholarship changed. there was no announcement worth the name and no obituary anywhere, because a dictionary closing is not a story the way a social network closing is a story.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

lexico was not the oxford english dictionary and a lot of people assumed it was. the oed is the twenty-volume historical record, still alive and still expensive. lexico carried the current-usage dictionaries, the ones that tell you what a word means today rather than tracing every sense back to 1400. that distinction never survived contact with a search box, which is why the free site was permanently mistaken for the famous one.

the partnership made sense on paper. oxford had the lexicography and no interest in running a consumer advertising business. dictionary.com had a hundred million monthly visitors and no scholarly dictionary of its own. each side rented what it lacked.

~ the address problem ~

renaming a reference site is a special kind of self-harm. people do not remember reference sites the way they remember brands, they remember the place they land. a decade of citations and bookmarks pointed at oxforddictionaries.com. every rename broke a slice of that, and the last one converted the remainder into a redirect at somebody else's domain.

this is the quiet way institutional web presences die. nothing burns down. an agreement expires, a dns record changes, and a body of work that people cited by url for twelve years stops having an address of its own.

~ where the words went ~

the definitions are still everywhere, which is the part that makes this a strange grave. oxford languages licenses that content into the dictionary box you get when you type a word into a search engine, so the definition still arrives, just with no name attached and no page to link to. the free public front door closed and the plumbing behind it got busier.

i cannot say i mourned this one at the time. i noticed it the way you notice a shop on your street has become a different shop, some months late, standing in front of it.

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