In only the first year, the historical corpus has grown to over 12 million words ranging in time from the early English alliterative poems through the early twentieth century. The historical corpus has a number of uses. It has also served as a means of checking quotations already in the OED . Folio and quarto texts of Hamlet, for instance, enable us to tell automatically which text has been the source of an OED quotation and to address the dating of these quotations with greater specificity. Beyond accumulating electronic resources, however, dictionaries need to consider how these resources can be used.
String searching is the most obvious technique.
It can take the place of tedious combing of paper files and concordances, and indeed with greater efficiency. But unless it is made part of an interactive editing system, the paper process is essentially unchanged. We need to find equivalencies, not merely for the tedious parts of paper lexicography, but for those accomplished comfortably with paper. An editor must be able to incorporate text automatically, and thus be able to manipulate text at will. The dictionary office of the future may involve editors working at many different sites accessing their materials through remote connections and communicating through email.