Lexico

• 1. Introduction

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  Lexico was a dictionary website that offered free access to Oxford University Press English and Spanish dictionaries, yet it was run not by Oxford, but by Dictionary.com. That unusual partnership sits at the heart of what Lexico was: a bridge between one of the world's oldest academic publishers and a commercial web portal built on a very different model. When it closed on the 26th of August 2022 and redirected visitors to Dictionary.com, it ended a story that had been building quietly for more than two decades. How did Oxford's words end up on someone else's website? And what does the platform's short life tell us about the difficulty of giving away authoritative reference material for free?

• 2. Oxford Online Before Lexico

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  Back in the 2000s, Oxford University Press offered public access to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English through a website called AskOxford.com. That was a modest foothold online, but in 2010 OUP moved much more ambitiously, launching Oxford Dictionaries Online at oxforddictionaries.com. The new site superseded AskOxford.com's dictionary content entirely. Buyers of the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, also published in 2010, were given a one-year subscription to the site's premium content as part of their purchase. The English dictionaries on that platform drew from four sources: the Oxford Dictionary of English, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Oxford Thesaurus of English, and the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. A Spanish monolingual dictionary and bilingual dictionaries between English and several other languages were also on offer, and the whole site was refreshed every three months. By 2016, OUP had split the service in two: the free content became Oxford Living Dictionaries, and the paid tier was relabelled Oxford Dictionaries Premium.

• 3. The Global Languages Experiment

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  In 2014, OUP launched Oxford Global Languages, an initiative aimed at building lexical resources for languages that had little or no digital dictionary presence. The first dictionaries released under the programme, in 2015, were for Zulu and Northern Sotho. By the time that branch of the operation was shut down in March 2020, it had grown to cover Zulu, Northern Sotho, Malay, Urdu, Tswana, Indonesian, Romanian, Latvian, Swahili, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Tatar, Xhosa, Southern Quechua, Tajik, Tok Pisin, Turkmen, Telugu, and Greek. The closure came with a statement from OUP explaining a shift in strategy: rather than running a dictionary website for every digitally under-resourced language, the press said it would focus on supplying data and let third parties build the products that each language community actually needed. It was a candid admission that hosting was not where OUP's comparative advantage lay.

• 4. The Dictionary.com Partnership

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  In June 2019, OUP and Dictionary.com moved the free English and Spanish dictionaries off Oxford Living Dictionaries and onto a new joint platform at Lexico.com. The lexicographic content remained the sole work of OUP staff; Dictionary.com provided the infrastructure and operated the site. The name Lexico was not invented for the occasion. It came directly from the former corporate name of Dictionary.com's parent company, Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. One wrinkle appeared immediately at launch: the US English dictionary was cut back, with only words absent from the UK dictionary carried over. That gap was filled in early 2020, when the full US dictionary was restored on Lexico. The arrangement meant that visitors could reach Oxford-quality definitions without a subscription, while Dictionary.com's own site continued to host dictionaries from other publishers, including Random House.

• 5. Lexico Versus the OED

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  The Oxford English Dictionary, known as the OED, and Lexico's dictionaries came from the same institution but served fundamentally different purposes. The OED is a subscription service and a historical record, tracing core English words and their meanings across more than a thousand years, from Old English to the present, including many terms that have long since dropped out of use. Meanings in the OED are arranged chronologically, ordered by when each was first recorded. Lexico, by contrast, used the Oxford Dictionaries API to offer the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary free of charge. Those dictionaries concentrated on current English, leading with the most common modern meanings rather than the oldest. The OED itself described the difference plainly, noting that its companion dictionaries focused on present-day usage while the OED formed a record of the language's entire documented history. That distinction shaped who used each resource and why.

• 6. Closure and Redirection

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  On the 26th of August 2022, Lexico closed. Visitors who typed lexico.com into their browsers were redirected to Dictionary.com. Oxford Dictionaries Premium, the paid subscription tier, continued to operate separately after the shutdown. The closure completed a long migration: Oxford's free dictionary presence online had moved from AskOxford.com to Oxford Dictionaries Online to Oxford Living Dictionaries to Lexico, each transition reflecting a shift in how OUP thought about distributing its lexicographic work. Through all those changes, the definitions themselves had also been reaching readers through other channels, including Google's definition search feature and the Dictionary application built into macOS, both of which drew on the Oxford Dictionaries API. The words outlasted the website.