Tommy says…

I’ve been conned.

For months, I’ve been using the Oxford Dictionary of English on Oxford Reference Online site as my primary online dictionary resource - it’s a subscription-only service, so I’ve been accessing it through the University of Sydney library site.

All this time, I’d thought that this was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – although the funny word order was a bit suspicious – because this was the link that shows up in the “Linguistics” section of the library’s online resources catalogue.

As it turns out, the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) is not the Oxford English Dictionary, which in fact has a separate site. Despite the similarity in name, the ODE is a tiny one volume dictionary, and very very different from the dozen volume OED. I finally clued in when I couldn’t find anything like etymology or quotations in the ODE.