This article traces the history of the word “coney”, its banishment from later editions of Bowdler's Family Shakspeare, as well as its reinstatement following alteration by a nineteenth-century lexicographer who sought to make it sound acceptable for family reading. Twenty-first-century actors delivering this line regularly use a pronunciation for “coney” that would, for any early modern audience, seem particularly alien. Assuring him that she is native to the place, Rosalind invokes the image of the “coney” that dwells near where it is kindled as proof of her local heritage. In As You Like It, Rosalind makes a passing comment in response to Orlando's questioning which seems, in all innocence, to refer to rabbits gambolling contentedly in Arden's idyllic forest. Currently revised material for OED3 has reached to letter “R”, 2012. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (Second Edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. Supplementing the entry headwords, there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations 249,300 etymologies 577,000 cross-references and 2,412,400 usage quotations. As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" text to convert it to machine readable form which consists a total of 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically.
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