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Description
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been widely recognized as one of the most trustworthy references in the world. Its quarterly updates have helped it keep pace with the development of the vocabulary. Rather extensive as its coverage of the English vocabulary is, the OED may have one obvious failing that is related to the recording of terminologies of various kinds. Through close examination of its online version, we have found the following terminology-related deficiencies in the OED: overall inadequacy in the total number of scientific terminology, imbalanced inclusion in many fields of study, a lack of labelling for scientific terminology, the absence of many initialisms and acronyms denoting scientific terminology, etc. This paper attempts to research into the coverage of terminology in the OED on the basis of a thorough comparison with online dictionaries of smaller sizes such as Collins English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Dictionary and several neologisms dictionaries as well. While analyzing the above-mentioned deficiencies in detail, the paper will also put forward suggestions for a better treatment of terminology in the dictionary.
